The production designer knew nothing about his decision. He leaned back his head and drank. He had wanted to make a clean sweep first, he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. And now . . . now he didn’t know what to do.
Robert needed a pee. It wasn’t because he did not want to listen, he said, going out to the bathroom. After he had flushed the pan and washed his hands he stood at the basin sceptically observing his own reflection. Why had he allowed this strange man to invade him, ingratiate himself with his daughter and keep him up late while he drank him out of the house? What were Andreas Bark’s romantic chaos and pathetic attempts to justify himself to do with him? He felt like having a cold beer, but let it pass. If they started drinking beer he would never get rid of him.
When he went back to the living room Andreas had put on his leather jacket. He kneeled down in front of Lauritz, who sat sleepily with his bicycle helmet over his eyes as his father tried to get his feet into his shoes. Robert asked several times if he should drive them home. On no account! Besides, it was fine now, Andreas smiled, the moon would light their way. Robert grew quite alarmed at the idea and told him to ride carefully, almost fussing over them. They went outside. The moon was full. He stood looking at Andreas’s silhouette as he bent over his bicycle. The playwright wobbled slightly as he disappeared into the shadows under the trees, until only his rear light could be seen. After a few moments he reappeared, still smaller on the silvery grey asphalt between the blacked-out houses.
As the train started to move he took a few steps alongside, continuing to wave to Lea through her window. Then she slid away from him, smiling and waving, and her face faded from his sight behind the reflection of the pale evening sky in the glass. He stood there under the station roof watching the train grow smaller and vanish at the end of the track, where the rails met, shining in the dusk. Everything around him seemed to stiffen. The nettles on the other side of the rails swayed slightly in the wind, but their rooted movement only emphasised all the surrounding immobility, the rusty goods wagons with unintelligible numbers and lettering in white, the empty platforms with their islands of bluish neon lights and advertisements for chocolate and life insurance picturing pretty women and resolute men. He walked back into the station, it was like a sleeping castle with its superfluous ornamentation and shining clock face beneath the comical spire on the roof ridge.
The station forecourt was deserted, but there were lights behind the windows of the red-brick apartment blocks dating from the early twentieth century, disappointingly uniform with their ground floors clad in sandstone or cement. A dairy had been replaced by a driving school, and in one corner there was a radio and television shop. The screens in the display window showed identical football players running around. The colours of the grass and the shirts varied slightly from screen to screen, and here and there he saw the blue light of other television screens behind the net curtains and tropical house plants with leathery leaves. The blue spots of light in the windows flickered in time with each other, according to who had the ball.
Maybe he had given in too quickly, too easily. He probably ought to have fought, tried to win Monica back, but he could not help smiling at the idea. He did not really believe you could bend others to your will once they had decided to love a new face or die behind the wheel, crushed beneath a Dutch truck. Moreover he would not have had the genuinely passionate conviction necessary to convince another person. His life had become simpler now he no longer had anyone to remind about unfinished business, and he had actually felt relieved when he left it behind him, all that bartering with meaningful caresses and vague promises. Nevertheless when he saw Lea in the train window, waving and smiling her all too brave, twelve-year-old smile, something seemed to wring his heart, an angry ownerless hand with white knuckles.
When he got home he made an omelette and ate it in the kitchen as usual. Afterwards he stretched out on the sofa and listened to the famous recording of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphoses by Karajan and the Berliners. He closed his eyes and let the wide, vast expanses of the strings overwhelm him as they displaced each other in soft avalanches, brooding and impenetrable like layers of earth and darkness. He felt something hard against his back and felt for it with his hand. It was the table tennis ball Lauritz had been squeezing when he fell asleep there the night before. He went over and switched off the music, then opened the sliding door to the terrace. He sat down on the doorstep with a cigarette. It was chilly, but he stayed there.
They had slept late, he and Lea. In the afternoon they drove out to the beach as usual. She gathered seagull feathers, a whole bunch, and he pulled out his pen-knife and showed her how to cut the ends, on a slant, with a vertical slit from the point, so she could use them as quill pens. She was more talkative than the previous day, the unexpected guests had obviously cheered her up. She spoke of being an actor, and he encouraged her. She had done well as the princess. The sun shone, and although it was still windy the sand was warm to sit on. Lea collected bundles of dried seaweed and snapped the bubbles between her fingers. There was an offshore wind, and the calm surface of the sea sparkled where the little waves swelled up, at first as long lines that slowly grew bigger until they broke into a small comb of foam which made trickling tracks through the pebbles on the shoreline.
How long had he been friends with Andreas? She liked him, and Lauritz was sweet. Robert smiled and watched a gull swooping past. Suddenly it started to flap its wings and the movement was reflected as a white flicker on the water. Not very long . . . Were they separated, Andreas and the woman with the strange name? She asked the question lightly, casually. The parents of half her friends were divorced, that was how it was, and the children adapted themselves. Yes, he said.
They had told her one morning, he and Monica, while they were still in the kitchen over breakfast and the sheaves of Sunday papers. She had merely looked at them, first at one, then the other, before going into her room and closing the door. When he went in she was sitting on her bed drawing on the back of her hand with a felt pen. Sometimes she and her friends drew on each other’s arms, but she was not drawing a flower, it was nothing, a growing, ever more complicated morass of turbulent lines crossing each other on her narrow hand. He sat down beside her and put his arm around her. She leaned away from him, looking down at the colourful duvet cover with an African pattern. He put his arm around her and sat there for a little while, trying to talk to her. Of course they both loved her. He looked at her, turned towards the stuffed animals leaning affectionately against each other. Both of them were still there. They just wouldn’t be together. She asked him to go.
Suddenly they had stopped quarrelling or just snarling at each other, he and Monica. By catching her in the act he had unintentionally and at one blow made every quarrel superfluous. After her new man had sent him the nod of a colleague as he passed the kitchen door and gently closed the front door with a cautious little click, everything between them had been fittingly businesslike. She had slept on the sofa in the living room until she moved. She even took charge of all the paperwork. There was clearly not a lot to discuss, and they both showed goodwill in getting it over as painlessly as possible. For Lea’s sake, as they said, almost conspiratorially, as if they suddenly had something in common.
He had had no suspicions, having assumed ups and downs were normal after ten years of marriage. He had not noticed that the downs had grown longer and longer, until everyday life was a treacherously calm sea in which shark fins shot up when you least expected them. An innocent exchange about cooking the dinner could suddenly end up in hair-raising accusations, and small oversights or chance errors mounted up like evidence in a long drawn-out trial before an imaginary judge. But who should condemn one and acquit the other? Crestfallen, they went back for a while to the everyday rhythm of trivialities until one of them again succumbed to accumulated boredom or despair and struck sparks at the slightest touch.
Afterwards he realised that her hypochondria and irritable outbursts had been a cover for her battered conscience, and he felt sorry for her with a backlash of sympathy. It must have been a nightmare, what for him was merely the numbed monotony of an extinguished cohabitation. When everything had fallen into place and they had adapted to their new reality, he was on the verge
