beneath her fluttering skirts. He felt he had to get in front again, after all he was the one who knew the place, and he rode up beside her. She cried out, there wasn’t room for two bicycles on the path and next moment he lost his balance. There was nothing in the least spiteful or malicious about her laughter. She merely laughed as he stood up, soaking wet and covered with mud. She laughed in the way he imagined a sister might have done.
He was aware of her every movement around the house. He listened for her steps on the stairs and the door of her room when it was closed, cautiously, he felt. It would be wrong to say she avoided him, but neither did she seek him out. Certainly it occurred to him that she might only have gone for walks on the beach or bicycle rides with him because she was a guest in the house. A guest who compensated for the hospitality she enjoyed by peeling potatoes and hanging up the washing and on the whole making as little noise as possible, and who thus saw it as one of her duties to keep him company. But that might just as well have been something he merely imagined.
She was consistently friendly, even after the afternoon in the shed out there in the water meadows, maybe a touch more detached, maybe not even that. She was so reserved and polite, both to him and to his uncle and aunt. He thought she hid herself behind her smile and her modesty, her readiness to help with domestic tasks and her efforts to sit nicely at table. At the beginning he had noticed her several times propping her knife and fork against the edge of her plate. She had pulled herself up and put them correctly on the plate itself when she saw his aunt’s slightly forced smile. He knew almost nothing about her. She had not told him anything except quite ordinary things about herself and that made her all the more baffling.
One late afternoon when she was down in the kitchen he went into her room. He looked at the things lying around, a young woman’s belongings and clothes, nothing special. He caught sight of himself in the spotted mirror above the wash basin, where the evening sun shone dimly and metallically around a dark, obscure figure without a face.
It might have been that night they heard the English planes again. The depressing, uniform drone was suddenly interrupted by a snarl that increased in strength and was abruptly silenced, to be followed shortly afterwards by a muffled crash like distant thunder.
Early next morning he went out again to sit in the nearest sand dune and observe her through the open bathroom window. He had just woken up when he heard her bare feet on the varnished stairs. He sneaked round the other side of the house after eventually plucking up courage, if it was courage that drove him, and not something else even stronger than his timidity. The sun had just risen above the roof and he had to shade his eyes with a hand. Suddenly she bent forward, her breasts hanging heavily for a moment beneath her forward-leaning torso. The window was closed with a bang.
He went down onto the beach. When he came back her bicycle had disappeared. He tried to picture what it would be like when she came back and he had to look her in the eye. If he left her to herself and was merely passive when she returned, it would seem like an admission that he had spied on her. He would have to find her and somehow convince her that it had been nothing like that, in fact. That it was a case of misunderstanding, a chance, unfortunate coincidence that he had been sitting in the marram grass when she happened to be in the bathroom. He had to do something, because even if he made things worse that would be better than doing nothing.
The thought struck him that she might have gone out to the meadows. He was through the plantation and on the other side of it when he saw her walking towards him, far away out there. He hid himself in the murk of the close-set pines until she had cycled past. A sunlit, unapproachable, energetic figure on the sunken road leading to the village. She was up in her room when he got home.
Later on, when they were at the breakfast table, she seemed her usual self, smiling in her nicely behaved manner. And perhaps nothing out of the way had happened, after all . . . His uncle reported hearing that an English aircraft had crashed somewhere to the north, near the sea. There was a photograph, taken on the same or one of the following days by a local photographer. A German soldier stood guard over the wrecked plane, you could glimpse the twisted iron struts that had braced the glass cage of the cockpit, and a piece of the wing with a double, dotted and dashed line, bent and broken, where the plates had been riveted together. On the wing were two concentric painted circles: the emblem of the Royal Air Force.
The consultant asked them if they had heard it. He himself had been woken up by the sound. The girl did not react but listened attentively to him, recounting the villagers’ description of it. She kept to herself that day, but maybe it was only because he dared not go near her. Maybe everything would have been normal if he had dared. At dinner the consultant told them that a parachute had been found drifting out in the fjord.
She went up to her room earlier than usual. When he too had gone to bed he lay listening as usual to the creaking of her bedsprings as they sank under her weight. He expected her to brush the timber wall with a toe, an elbow or a knee, as if to touch him. His aunt was still downstairs listening to the radio. In the silence he could hear the muffled music. He pictured the girl’s body beside him in the darkness on the other side of the wall, so close that he could reach out and touch her.
She lies awake listening in the silence. She listens to the woodwork relaxing after being warmed by the sun, the squeaking tap and running water in the room on the other side of the corridor, where the consultant is cleaning his teeth. Then he too goes to bed. The housekeeper has already retired for the night but the lady of the house is still down in the sitting room with the wireless set, under the lamp that sheds its light in vain on the matt black-out curtain, as if the window looks out onto a mountain wall.
The muffled dance music penetrates through ceiling and wall timbers to the young woman lying in the dark listening. Cool lingering music, like the breeze from the open window, she thinks, and visualises the mature woman, in the dark crimson armchair, her hands on its arms, gazing at the woven panel of the loudspeaker. She wears a white blouse and a long, pleated skirt and silk stockings, as if dressed for town. As if she had just come home after an evening at a restaurant where you can dance to an orchestra playing that kind of music.
The two women listen to the softly flowing strings and saxophones playing for whoever is awake at this hour around the blacked-out land. They listen to the same music, but the older woman thinks she is listening alone. That she is the only one picturing a dance floor in town, brilliantly lit, with gliding figures, the men in dark clothes, the women with sparkling necklaces, in long dresses that swing around them like flower-heads, fans or wings.
The girl waits for the music to die down. Then she listens for the other woman’s steps, the sound of running water in the bathroom pipes and the long silence before her hostess finally comes upstairs and gently opens and closes the door of her room. The consultant and his wife have separate rooms. The girl waits for a while longer, after the silence is no longer disturbed by anything except the slight rattling of the black-out curtain in the breeze from the open window. Probably half an hour passes, perhaps the best part of an hour, before she dares leave her bed, cautiously, as she braces her arms against the springs to quieten them and not give herself away. She gets dressed in the dark and slowly presses down the latch so she can open the door soundlessly. She knows which of the stair treads creak.
While she helped prepare the evening meal she secretly filled a basket and hid it in the woodshed. The key of the kitchen door clicks slightly. She stands and waits before slowly pushing the door open. It sticks a bit and she barely closes it after her, without pushing down the handle. She has left her bicycle a little way away from the house. No one will be able to hear her when she mounts it and cycles out onto the road.
It is a clear, light night and she has no trouble finding her way through the blue landscape. Only when she rides through the plantation does it get so dark she can barely see the track. She has to look up and follow the opening between the topmost branches of the pines where the sky makes a blue path in the blackness with a slim moon and a few stars.
