their corners peeping at each other, red in the face with suppressed laughter. Monica bit her under-lip and gazed stiffly at the road in front of her. He laid a placatory hand on her knee, she jerked it aside and he took his hand away.
She seldom mentioned Sonia. She had left home when her sister was five, but even though the little wild cat then had her parents to herself she had nourished an implacable jealousy of her sister. Once when Monica had brought a boyfriend home Sonia bit his finger so hard he had to go to casualty. At that time their father was in his mid-sixties and more remote than ever before, and their mother, who was fifteen years younger, seemed to wilt at the prospect of starting from the beginning again. She did have a life herself, as she said sometimes to her grown-up daughter. Monica asked why on earth she had had another child then, but her mother merely assumed a distant expression. It had been an accident.
Little by little Robert heard the stories of how Sonia had cut their mother’s underclothes into small pieces with the kitchen scissors, poured ink over the case documents in her father’s study and emptied a bag of sugar into the petrol tank of his new Volvo. The high point had come when at the age of fourteen she got one of the boys in her class to telephone a bomb threat to the Supreme Court one day when her father was appearing there. Monica could recall how her sister had sat, arms crossed with her eyes on the carpet while her father asked her why she hated them so much. She made no reply, but when he asked if she would rather not live with them, she had looked up and said yes.
She was taken at her word. According to her own account Monica tried to persuade their parents not to send her to boarding school. But what she had feared did happen. Sonia’s hatred towards her had just grown formidably deeper. Her silence and enforced good behaviour when she was home on a visit was worse than all her terrorist whims. It was not until Sonia was at sixth-form college that they had come to an understanding, said Monica, yet Robert sensed a lack of genuineness in Sonia’s smile when she finished her tai chi and flopped down smiling on the grass beside Monica’s deck chair. At lunch-time he had noticed her sending brief, calculating glances at her elder sister, who listened intently to her father and replied to his questions in her higher and somehow diluted version of his antiquated diction.
The sun hung low above the pine trees behind the sand dunes and the orthopaedic hospital. It was an old seaside hotel from the Twenties, and Robert only had to look at the white-washed functionalist building to hear a distant echo of sentimental saxophones. More than once Monica’s mother had described how her husband had proposed to her on the dance floor there, in his white dinner jacket. He corrected her every time, it was black, but she persisted with rare stubbornness. It was white. After all, it had been the only time anyone had actually proposed to her. The foaming crests of the waves sparkled in the low sunlight. The Sound was dark blue and melted into the misty sky behind the Swedish coast. The Kullen promontory over there was nothing but a frail grey finger pointing out into the blue. Robert held Lea’s hands, she squealed when he pulled her through the surf. The sun cast a reddish glow on Sonia’s and Monica’s bare backs as they waded out. Monica was slightly taller than her sister but he thought they resembled each other seen from behind, sway-backed and slim. They laughed as they plunged in and vanished, each in a flower of foam and bubbles, to reappear a moment later a little farther out.
Sonia came out first, she thought it was too cold. Her lips were blue and trembling, she had goose-flesh on her thighs and breasts and her dark nipples stood on end with the cold. He handed her a towel. She smiled and turned her back while she dried herself. Monica crawled along the furthest reef with long, measured strokes. Her forehead and cheeks caught the sunlight when she turned her face towards them for a moment. He told Sonia she had changed since he last saw her. She certainly hoped so. She smiled again and wound the towel around herself and sat down beside him. He looked at their fluted shadows in the sand. Lea squatted a little way off, she had made a small hill of wet sand and was decorating it with mussel shells.
He offered Sonia a cigarette, she didn’t smoke, he lit one for himself. How long was she staying? For a month, then she would go back. She talked about New York, where she shared an apartment in Little Italy with a Belgian girl. Actually there wasn’t much Italian in Little Italy, the Chinese had taken over. Really . . . She asked if it wasn’t a strain for Monica and him to work at the same hospital. A strain? Yes . . . She smiled at his uncomprehending expression. He said it was really very practical. But didn’t they get on top of each other? He waved to Lea when she raised her head and looked at them. She had a shadow of wet sand on one cheek. You don’t get much time to do that, he replied, and anyway they worked in different departments. She nodded in agreement and looked at him with feigned attention, as if she was not really listening.
He had changed as well. She dug her toes into the sand. He smiled and gazed at his cigarette. The wind lifted the flakes of ash from the glowing tip and bore them away. Maybe he was a bit fatter. She regarded him for a moment. Yes, but it suited him. He started to question her about her dancing in order to change the subject. Monica came out of the water and ran up to them, shining and wet. Sonia interrupted herself and looked at him again. Why did he ask about that? Surely it didn’t interest him. She said it with a smile, seemingly not in the least put out. Monica groaned and pushed her wet hair off her forehead with both hands. She put on his bathing robe, tied it tightly around her waist and lit a cigarette, looking out over the water. The sleeves reached down to the tips of her fingers. She jutted her jaw and blew out smoke. Beautiful she looked, with wet plastered-back hair and sparkling drops in her eyelashes around the calm grey-blue eyes.
They had dinner on the terrace facing west, where there was a view over the hills. The last rays of sun shone through the grass and the glasses of white wine on the table. It sparkled on the cutlery and the barrister’s unframed spectacles resting on the tip of his sunburned hawk nose. The talk was of weather and wine. It was South African, a bit of an experiment but there was not much choice at the local grocer’s, and it was really quite drinkable. Monica yawned discreetly and Lea rocked her chair, ignoring frequent commands to stop. Sonia showed her how to turn her napkin into a white dove and a white rabbit by turns. They all had their own silver-plated napkin rings, including Robert. The napkins were not changed for several days, this was life in the country, of course.
After the others had gone to bed Robert remained sitting outside in the dusk with his host, chiefly out of politeness. They smoked small Italian cheroots, something they had in common. How about a whisky, then? He had a quite excellent single malt, a present from a client. He went inside. A purple glow lingered in the heather and the tall grass between the silhouetted pine trees and juniper bushes. He came back with the bottle and two glasses, stooping and tanned like old leather in the blue half-light. He really liked the Sibelius symphony Robert had given him for his birthday, the sixth, wasn’t it? He sat on for a while with the cheroot between his fingers. Usually music was something that somehow passed one by with its themes and variations and whatever you call them. Robert would have to stop him if he got too muddled. But with Sibelius it was quite the opposite. Like moving around in a vast landscape. It wasn’t that anything definite happened in the music, it just happened. He shook his head. That was probably a load of drivel. Robert smiled. Not at all. But he really liked it, indeed he did.
He replenished their glasses. Good stuff, eh? Not the usual meths rubbish. They sat for a while listening to the grasshoppers and the cuckoo. A silhouette detached itself from the shadows and came closer. The lights shining out from the living room fell on Sonia’s round cheeks and pointed chin framed by her flowing hair. She had been for a walk. A little one to sleep on? She smiled indulgently. No, thanks. She turned on the threshold as she said goodnight. Robert could hear the floorboards creak and the dry sound of her bare feet on the stairs and far away a door being closed. His host sparked his lighter and sucked in his cheeks as he lit his cheroot again. Suddenly he looked very old.
Being a dancer didn’t seem a very secure occupation. He held the cheroot vertically between two fingers watching the thin whirls of smoke. But still, he was glad she had at long last found out what she wanted to do. He paused for a moment. Sonia hadn’t been easy. Robert could feel the other man looking at
