so soon after he had come out with his guilty revelation.
In the midst of it all the telephone rang. It was Jacob. Robert asked him to hold on and went into the living room, turned down the music and picked up the receiver. He could hear them chatting in the kitchen and called out to Lea to put the phone down. Had he got visitors? Robert said some friends had called. It sounded authentic, he thought, yet awkward, somehow defensive. He hardly ever had guests. Jacob was disappointed, he could hear. He was going to ask them over. It was about time he introduced them to his daughter. Robert said it would have to be another time, and felt pleased Andreas and Lauritz had turned up. Jacob asked if he would like to play tennis on Monday. There was something he wanted to talk to Robert about. What? Jacob lowered his voice, he would rather not mention it on the phone. Robert said Monday would be fine.
They laid dinner on the pingpong table, it was Andreas’s idea. There wasn’t enough room at the small kitchen one. They sat around one half of the table and while Lauritz dropped the contents of his plate into his lap with methodical concentration, Lea asked his father how you could become an actor. Obviously the role of princess in the school play had put ideas into her head. Andreas answered her naïve questions patiently and she listened with a grown-up smile and a hand under her chin, holding the stem of her wine glass of coke. After dinner she tried to teach Lauritz to play table tennis. She stood him on a chair and didn’t give up until to his own surprise he managed to serve.
Lauritz fell asleep on the sofa. Lea served coffee like a real housewife. It was too weak, but Robert didn’t mention that. She listened while Andreas talked about Italy. He and Lucca had lived in Rome before Lauritz was born. He spoke of her as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t practically driven herself into death one night the previous week because he had told her he wanted a divorce. They had had a little flat in Trastevere, and Lea swallowed his anecdotes about the quaint inhabitants of the working-class district who shuffled out shopping in slippers and dressing gown, about the winding alleyways with peeling walls and washing lines, about the baker’s wife with her moustache and the blacksmith’s chickens. Yes, chickens . . . imagine, in the middle of Rome! Robert thought it all sounded rather too authentic. Lea said Lucca was an odd name. Andreas explained that really Lucca was a boy’s name. Her parents had been sure she would be a boy. But they had hung onto the name. Her father was Italian, she was named after the town in Tuscany where he was born. Lea thought it sounded beautiful and looked at Robert.
She began to yawn and reluctantly gave way to sleepiness. She kissed Robert on the cheek when she said goodnight, hesitated a bit and then gave their guest a kiss too. For a while the two men sat in silence over their coffee cups and Calvados. The easiness had disappeared with Lea. They could hear her gargling as she cleaned her teeth and soon afterwards the sound of her door being quietly closed. Lauritz turned over in his sleep, Robert put the rug over him. Again he felt surprised at how his guest could change expression from one moment to the next. Andreas lit a cigarette and flopped onto the sofa, blowing out smoke. The corners of his mouth drooped, a lock of hair fell over one eye and he fixed his vacant gaze on a point on the carpet beneath the sofa table.
Obviously, he said, he felt guilty, but . . . he was not to know she would . . . it couldn’t have come as a complete surprise to her. Just after he’d said it he thought she had taken it with a strange composure. They were still at the table after dinner. Lauritz had been put to bed. To start with it seemed they would be able to talk sensibly about it. It wasn’t hard for Robert to visualise, he had sat in the same kitchen, at the same table, and now he knew what she looked like. She had asked if there was someone else. He sighed deeply. He had said no . . .
Might he have another Calvados? Robert made a gesture. Andreas poured for both of them. Up to now everything had been so banal, the marital scene one night in the house beside the woods and the unfaithful husband sitting here on his sofa marinating his guilt in Calvados. He was not in the least sorry for him, though the banality of the other man’s story made Robert despise him. He was just so tired suddenly. Andreas downed the contents of his glass in one gulp and looked at him through the billowing veil of smoke from his cigarette. He leaned his sorrowful face on one hand so his cheek half closed one eye and made him look like a grieving Caucasian. What sort of seductive silhouette was dancing behind his despondent gaze? Was she playing a tambourine?
He had attended the rehearsals of his play in Malmö. The set designer was ten years younger than him, from Stockholm, one of the new bright sparks. Much was expected of her. Andreas cast a glance out of the panorama window to the sheer deep-blue patch of sky over the dark outline of the treetops. He would never have believed it would happen to him again. He had thought he was too old to fall in love. He looked down at his empty glass. He had not slept with anyone else since meeting Lucca, although there had been plenty of chances. In his world . . . he smiled and looked at Robert again. Yes, people were always hopping into bed. But it was probably the same in hospital, too? Robert shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.
Ironically enough they had met each other in much the same way, he and Lucca. She was an actor. At the time she had been with a director, much older than herself. He had been to visit them at the director’s house in Spain. The old guy was going to put on a play of his, he was a big shot, it was an honour. And then suddenly she had been there, Lucca, and everything had become alarmingly complicated.
His eyes sought Robert’s. Everything had gone so fast, and in a flash she was pregnant. He lit a fresh cigarette and picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. When he had jumped into it he hadn’t dared to confront his doubts at first. Lucca just had to be the one, and so she was, at least for a time. As soon as they got to Rome they spoke of finding a house in the country. But how could he put it? It wasn’t just the routine, the inevitable jogging along when you had a child. It was something else, something deeper. A lack he could not explain and so had been able to ignore for long periods at a time.
He felt he could not share his innermost self with Lucca. She didn’t understand him, so she did not know how to bring out those depths in him he could hardly explain. He flung out his hand and almost upset the bottle. Robert threw a glance at the sleeping boy, covered by the blanket, the table tennis ball clutched in his small hand. Lucca had turned her back on the theatre after she had Lauritz, completely absorbed in the child and in building up their home with a trowel and great expectations. But what use was that, when she wasn’t . . . their mutual attraction had been mainly physical. Bed had always been good, as a woman she was very . . . well . . . he inhaled and blew out the smoke with a deep sigh. But there was something lacking.
That was when Malmö came into the picture. It wasn’t just a question of erotic fascination. Although she was very beautiful, he emphasised in passing. Her parents were Polish Jews, and she had that special blend of inky black hair, very white skin and ice-blue eyes. Robert couldn’t help smiling. Gypsy or Jewess, it came to the same thing, a tambourine would be almost superfluous. But there was something else that made a difference, something more . . . Andreas did not know how to describe what it was she did to him, the Jewish production designer. It was as if she touched on something inside him, deep inside. As if she made some string vibrate, a string he didn’t know he possessed. And each time he took the last hovercraft from Sweden he could feel his life’s centre of gravity had moved so that he left it behind when he travelled home to Copenhagen through the night.
He hadn’t even been to bed with her, in a way that was crazy, but it did convince him there was something different and more serious afoot. After the première she had gone back to Stockholm. He had called her on the quiet and they wrote to each other, he hadn’t written that sort of letter for years. Several weeks had gone by like that. He had been on the verge of collapse, surrounded by bags of cement and ploughed fields and Lucca’s anxious, searching eyes. Luckily he had planned a month’s stay in Paris to work. She must have noticed there was something wrong, but she did not question him, neither then nor when she went to stay with him for a few days. And finally he had made up his mind. He had just come back from Paris on the night he told her. He stopped talking and poured himself another Calvados, this time
