ankle.
Monica had thought he would learn to ski quite easily, and to begin with he thought it was just a bad conscience that made her devote so much time to him. She went skiing only in the mornings, and spent the afternoons with him at the holiday flat in the ugly concrete block where their friends slept in sleeping bags all over the place and wet ski socks steamed on every radiator. She rustled up lunches and made vin chaud, and he was surprised at her gentleness when she asked if he was in pain, or supported him when he hobbled out to the bathroom. He had noticed this gentleness when she sat beside him in hospital while his foot was put in plaster. She looked at him and smiled, and suddenly she put out a hand and stroked the hair from his forehead with a brief, easy movement.
She lit candles when it grew dark. They sat with their red wine, wrapped in blankets looking out at the snow-clad mountaintops between the concrete blocks of the skiing hotels. They talked about everything imaginable between heaven and earth, exchanged childhood memories and described the books they had read. They were not particularly profound but for once they dropped the safe ironical distance that had brought them together but held them in check. One afternoon, after a long pause during which neither had spoken, she asked if he would hate her to kiss him.
It was different, it was a world away from handcuffs and screaming and sharp red nails. The transitions were milder and less noticeable, from words to pauses, from pauses to caresses, and from their hands’ indolent playful exchanges to the first time she straddled him and sank her blushing face to his under the blanket she pulled over them like a woollen Bedouin tent, with slightly narrowed eyes and a shy smile that he hadn’t seen before.
To begin with they didn’t let on, the others were too close and it was too delicate, too new. They gave nothing away, and he marvelled at the different faces she put on, and how good she was at keeping them separate. He went on wondering about it in the years that followed. When she showed him one face, the cool and distanced one, he was all the more attracted because he thought of the other one, and when she revealed her gentle, vulnerable side to him his tenderness increased at the thought that it was a face which showed itself only secretly, under cover, like that first time under the woollen blanket in the French Alps.
One warm Saturday morning he took a train north. The compartment was full of lightly dressed children and adults looking out impatiently at the glinting water and the little white triangles of pleasure boats leaning into the wind behind all the greenery racing past the windows. Monica had the car, she was meeting him at the station. She was in shorts and a bathing suit, leaning against the bonnet, absent-mindedly rattling the car keys. When he caught sight of her he realised he had been missing her. They were used to being together, a week was a long time. She smiled grimly and sent him an ominous glance as she started the car. He had something to look forward to, her father was in top form. But her little sister was home from New York, that should ease the situation. They got on so well together, said Monica with emphasis as if she was not quite sure. Robert had only met Sonia a couple of times.
Monica’s father was a barrister, and she had inherited his hawk nose and jutting chin, although to a lesser degree. She had also inherited his cool, spiky sarcasm and a touch of his aristocratic diction. In town he always wore a grey suit and bow tie, but he was as distrait as he was elegant, and more than once he had appeared in the Supreme Court with bicycle clips on his trousers. When he was on holiday he reluctantly conformed to the rules of holiday wear and put on a pair of khaki shorts, but his white legs ended in a pair of brown leather shoes with a dazzling shine, and his shirt always looked newly ironed.
He could be extremely cantankerous and every day over lunch in the garden he made sarcastic comments on the undesirable sweetness of the herrings. Year after year they grew noticeably sweeter, as if they were turning into children’s sweets! Apart from the sweet herrings he saw communists everywhere, and the fall of the Berlin wall had not cured his phobia. On the contrary, he ceaselessly complained about the reunification of Germany and the outrageous chaos apparent in his world picture. It almost sounded as if according to his view the Iron Curtain had existed to keep out the Asiatic hordes rather than fence them in. Robert had given up arguing with him, to his obvious disappointment.
Monica’s mother was a plump but comely woman, always in pleated or tartan skirts and a silk blouse buttoned up to the neck. She was a shadow, every single movement and each word she spoke corresponded to what the barrister did or said. She put up with his malicious arrogance and choleric attacks, she anticipated his slightest wish with a sweet smile and calming, motherly tone, and her only defiance seemed to show itself in attacks of migraine that forced her to spend whole afternoons in her bedroom behind closed curtains. According to Monica she had taken her revenge by having an affair for years with a psychiatric consultant. Everyone knew about it but no one mentioned it, said Monica. A bit of a mystery, thought Robert. Surely someone must have whispered, at least. Moreover the consultant was the living image of her father, she told him, with silver-grey hair and unyielding opinions, only he wore a silk scarf round his neck instead of a bow tie.
When she heard the car in the drive Lea came running. She was only in underpants, with gawky sunburned arms and legs, and her navel protruded from her belly. She leaped into Robert’s arms, almost knocking him over. The lunch table was laid under a parasol in the garden which sloped up to an undulating terrain covered with heather and juniper bushes. They sat down, and Monica’s mother called several times in vain to the younger sister, carping and impatient, as you call to a child who will not break off her game. She did not appear until the barrister shouted her name in his deep voice with his head half-turned towards the house, bent over and expectant, with restrained irritation.
She must have been in her early twenties. When she sat down between Robert and Monica, he felt surprised they were sisters. Where Monica’s movements were angular and effective, there was something indolent about Sonia. She moved at a slower tempo and lingered over each thing she did, as if she had to ask herself what she was actually engaged in, whether it was spreading cottage cheese on crispbread or pushing her untidy hair away from her soft, heart-shaped face. Her dark hair was a mass of curls and longer than Monica’s, which was smooth and cut in a practical style. She wore a silver ring on one big toe and spoke with a slight drawl, pronouncing the s’s like a schoolgirl in a way that irritated Robert. Her long batik dress had faded in the wash and hung loosely around her. Monica never wore dresses.
She was the wild one of the family. That’s what they had called her when she was small, the little wild cat. They had been unable to control her, the barrister and his check-skirted wife, and she was sent to boarding school at fourteen. After leaving school she went to Israel, stayed in a kibbutz for six months and when she grew tired of picking oranges she went to Jerusalem where she attended dance school and fell in love with an American. She accompanied him when he flew back to New York, their relationship was probably at an end then, but to everyone’s surprise she succeeded in getting admitted to Martha Graham’s school. Her father paid up without protest. To make sure she didn’t come back, Monica had said with a smile.
After lunch she pulled her dress over her head and started to do tai chi on the lawn dressed only in pants like Lea, who watched open-mouthed. The barrister changed his brown leather shoes for a pair of chunky clogs and began weeding the rose bed, his pipe clenched energetically between his teeth. Their hostess went indoors to lie down. Robert and Monica sat in deck-chairs reading. Now and then he stole a glance at Sonia, who went through her long drawn-out movements with a self-satisfied, contemplative expression. There was something frail about her torso, out of proportion with her strong arms and muscular legs. Her breasts were small and childish, as if not fully developed, and her hips were as narrow as a boy’s.
Late in the day Robert and Monica drove down to the beach with Sonia and Lea. Sonia sat in the back playing mouse with a hand on Lea’s back, tickling her neck and under her chin. They both giggled as if they were the sisters. When Sonia tickled Lea in the side she doubled up laughing and happened to kick the driver’s seat, which was too much for Monica who asked sharply if they wanted to end up in the ditch.
