too had her little secrets. Robert brushed ash from his white coat. The windows at the end of the foyer stretched from floor to ceiling, and a long way into the pallid mirror of the linoleum flooring, along the empty ranks of sofas where he dimly glimpsed his white figure and crossed legs. He could be any doctor on night duty, sitting enjoying a fag. What was that, Jacob had said? It probably didn’t have to be one thing or the other. Again he visualised one particular face. It was a long time ago.
They had just bought a bigger apartment, where they lived until that winter day three years later when he came home too early. It had actually been somewhat beyond their means. It was large and needed a lot of decorating, but they could not afford to get it done professionally. It was in an old property just outside the city centre, near the harbour. There was a playground in the courtyard where some space had been made. Monica took Lea for a holiday with her parents while he did the painting. He joined them at weekends. Lea was to start in the first class at school after the summer holidays. He had installed himself in what was to be her room, with her mattress, a lamp, the stereo and a selection of tapes. The furniture and crates had been packed into one of the other rooms under plastic sheeting.
Monica called him every day. She had a bad conscience about lying in the sun while he was left in town slogging away, but in fact he enjoyed being alone. Most of the neighbouring flat dwellers were out travelling, and he could play music as loudly as he liked. He forgot the time, absorbed in the monotonous work while Verdi’s Requiem blew through the empty rooms. Lying on Lea’s mattress in the evenings reading the paper he felt like a nomad who had temporarily pitched camp in a chance spot. The feeling of a state of emergency had a cheering effect on him, and there were moments when he even wished it could go on, this pause between the daily life that had been packed up, and the one that would begin when he had finished painting.
Sometimes he said jokingly to Monica that when Lea had grown up they could leave the flat to her and move into a hotel. It was an old daydream, to live in a hotel room with only the most essential possessions, ready to move at a moment’s warning, and while he was painting it was like bringing the dream to life. He ate at a restaurant every evening, alone or with a friend, and afterwards cycled through the town as he had done in student days. The nights were light, the walls and asphalt still held a little of the sun’s warmth, and he sat in pavement cafés observing the passers-by, sunburned and lightly dressed, as if in a southern city.
One night, with one of his old student friends, he strayed into a discotheque. It was a long time since he had been in such a place, the music had changed, now it was even more fatuous and deafening, he thought. The girls wore the same kind of clothes as the big girls had at the beginning of the Seventies when he himself was still an adolescent schoolboy. Those fashions had become smart again but that only made him feel still more out of place. A new generation had taken over the town and he enjoyed standing at the bar wistfully thinking of the time he had lurched around himself with some unknown beauty, sweating and tipsy in the flickering lights, to Fleetwood Mac or The Eagles. He smiled, ‘Hotel California’, it was there, in the stupefied and weightless morning hours, that he had fantasised about moving in some day.
When the girls looked at him he could feel that in their eyes he was an oldish, slightly foozling guy on the wrong track. They were just as unapproachable and insecure, just as ingenuous and at the same time imperious as pretty girls always had been. They only had their dreams, their bright faces and their young bodies, but as long as the music played the lack of qualifications was a strength rather than a weakness. He threw them silent glances as he sat over his beer and soothed himself by thinking that luckily he no longer had anything to prove. He had never been unfaithful to Monica, the very thought seemed absurd.
He got together with her in his late twenties, while they were students. Up to then he had had four, perhaps five girlfriends, according to how strictly you interpret that definition, and apart from those there had been a handful of other episodes with no after-effects whatsoever. He could barely remember their names or distinguish one face from another. He had been shy when young, he had found it difficult to play the game, and he found it particularly hard to talk to completely strange girls when it was abundantly clear, at least to himself, that a conversation was the last thing he was trying to instigate. So he was all the more astonished when one of them offered her favours just like that and the Devil suddenly grabbed him as if he had never before done anything other than putting ladies down on their backs.
When he and Monica became an item they had already known each other for some years. They had been in the same circle of friends, and had themselves become friends, neither had believed they would ever be anything else. Maybe it was the reticent attitude in both that made them feel good in each other’s company and at the same time stopped them falling in love. But it was also the dry sense of humour they shared. They were known as the ironic observers in the group, amusing themselves over the excesses of the others. Otherwise they were very different, Robert with his modesty and his eccentric penchant for classical music, Monica with her cool, sharp-edged manner and tough way of expressing things, with no mollifying circumlocutions.
Her contours were so clear and sharp that she was almost mysterious. In a discussion her arguments were as penetrating as chain-saws, she swam like a fish and at tennis served harder than the most formidable guys. No-one had ever seen her dance and she always went to parties or dinners alone. She left alone too, and rumour had it that she might be lesbian. She never used make-up and dressed like a boy in jeans and roll necks all the year round, but she was actually rather good-looking. She was blonde and her profile was almost classical with a prominent nose and small, square jaw. It just didn’t occur to anyone to notice she was rather beautiful. You didn’t think that far because her energetic, masculine movements and challenging grey-blue eyes stopped you observing her in peace.
Robert had been afraid of her until he discovered he could make her laugh. Since then they had been inseparable at parties in summer villas in the north of Sealand, late into the night when people began to filter in pairs into bedrooms or down on the beach. They were always the last ones to sit over the half-empty bottles and flickering garden lights, but they both brought such consideration or animation to their repartee that the idea of so much as touching each other would have seemed plain comic. Even though several people had in fact asked him whether anything was brewing. He himself didn’t give it a thought.
At that time he was in a relationship with an architecture student who always dressed in black with make-up pale as a doll and blood-red lips. He never found out whether they were really a couple, she was unpredictable and disliked being shown off, as she called it. She insisted on his putting her in handcuffs when they made love, he hadn’t tried that before. Otherwise she was hard to pin down, but although she was so elusive she could just as suddenly take it into her head to surrender to him. He went on putting up with her whims merely to hear her scream like a madwoman and feel her bore her long red nails into his shoulders once more when she came. He had grown dependent on her nervous, frail body and her need for ritual subjection, and when he heard the handcuffs clink around her delicate wrists he couldn’t be sure who fettered whom. As a whole he was not sure of anything where she was concerned. He suspected her of continuing to see her former lover, an architect who in the end did not have the courage to leave his wife and children, but he never managed to find out for certain before she finally vanished from his life.
That had a depressing effect on him and he did not feel inclined to join the group of friends on their annual skiing trip to France. His relationship with the temperamental slave-girl had been so intense and hectic that he never had time to ask himself whether he felt anything for her beyond a passionate and confused desire. But after she had disappeared he plunged into melancholy and suddenly felt certain that the woman with her handcuffs held something profoundly inscrutable which he had not been man enough to elicit. Besides, he couldn’t ski at all, though finally he let Monica persuade him, after he had entertained her with his disappointed ruminations, grateful to her for listening to him. She undertook to teach him and after a day or two he braved the ski lift with her. A few hours later he was in the local
