his eyes. Well, they knew each other by now, he was sure he could rely on Robert not to let it go any further. He had never told anyone about it. He threw away the cheroot stub, a little red dot among the grass blades. Sonia was not his daughter. He had discovered it when she was small and their doctor, an old friend, had done a blood test on her for some reason. He had asked his friend to make the necessary analyses, confidentially. Neither of the girls nor their mother knew anything. But the tests had confirmed an old suspicion. And he could count on his fingers.
Robert undressed without putting on the light. Lea slept on a divan placed against the opposite wall. Monica was awake when he lay down beside her. She pressed against him and kissed his neck, while her hand slid under the elastic on his underpants. They lay quite still when they heard her father’s heavy step on the stairs, like teenagers at a holiday camp, thought Robert. He felt burdened by the knowledge he had been laden with, and by having to lie here, constrained to keep it to himself. She pushed her tongue into his ear and took hold of his testicles. He really felt too tired but he knew what she was thinking. It was a week since they’d made love, and tomorrow night he would have left again. The longer their times apart were, the more important it became, as if they had something to prove. They didn’t speak of it as such, it just lay in the air, the oftener the better, and if too long a time went by he could feel her getting worried.
There was so much he understood without her needing to spell it out. A glance was enough or a pause before she started tidying the living room or putting dirty washing in the machine, too energetically. But it could also be an ironic smile in the midst of the conversation and the partying faces if they were out amongst others. He knew immediately what she was thinking. They often laughed about their almost telepathic talents when one of them said something the other had been thinking the moment before, whether it was a reaction to what was going on around them or something they had talked about several days earlier.
If their mutual wordless understanding was what bound them together, in a way they had been destined for each other long before they themselves came to see it like that, under the blanket in the Alps. The irony that for so long had prevented them from being demonstrative and restrained their potential desire from erupting was simultaneously a secret code, a portent of later intimacy. But in all their trustful security they left just as much unsaid as they had when they were slowly edging towards each other without realising it.
They knew each other so well. He knew her excitability behind the cool façade and her reluctance to be the first one to stretch out a hand in reconciliation. She knew his awkward distraction and restraint, misinterpreted by those around him as arrogance. They made allowances for each other’s foibles, outwardly they came close to being invincible, and reciprocally they made use of their knowledge to both please and punish each other. A few words about Lea needing shoes, or where you could find the best tomatoes, could cover an ocean of tenderness, and a remark that the oven needed cleaning could cause quivers of indignation over something quite different. And it was understood, the purchase of small white shoes or firm dark-red tomatoes was transformed into a loving act, and when the oven was cleansed of congealed fat, every affront was expiated.
It wasn’t necessary to say everything, he had thought, happy at understanding and being understood, but as time went on he wondered if there were certain things that just couldn’t be said. That was what he was thinking, with Monica lying at his side working away at him until he finally obeyed, almost by reflex, and began to grow hard in her practised hand. Now it was time, after a week of enforced abstinence. She sat on top of him, the bed creaked rhythmically as she started to glide up and down. Lea mumbled and turned over in her sleep, Monica stopped, giggling softly. She went on, more slowly, and the creaking sound gradually became a dry groaning each time he thrust against her cervix.
He tried to summon passion and cupped his hands under her breasts. They had started to droop a little, not much, just a little, she still had a nice body. But it seemed that she noticed his hands’ hesitancy, the restraint in their light touch, for she took hold of his wrists and forced them down on the mattress on each side of the pillow moaning and pushing harder against him. That worked, he felt the blood vessels tensing to breaking point, and a tingling and trickling from below as she whispered to him encouragingly on its stiffness and hardness. For a fraction of a second he visualised Sonia, the drops of salt water on her pimpled, erect nipples as he passed her the towel. He jerked the image away as you brutally jerk a curtain, and finally they found release, soon after each other, she whimpered as she flopped down over him and buried her face between his neck and shoulder.
She moved close to him again with her face against his chest. He kissed her forehead and his fingers ran through her hair. She whispered how good it had been. He repeated her words. She couldn’t know what he was thinking, yet he was worried she might notice. It was hot in the cramped room, he put one leg outside the duvet. Monica breathed in his face. Her breath was sweetish, a bit like hot milk. He kissed her again and turned over with his back to her. She put an arm around his stomach and pulled herself against his back. Intimacy – he thought of it again. At this moment it was no more than the feeling of being shut in together in a much too confined room. An enclosed space, he thought, in which the oxygen was gradually being used up. But that was only for now.
The next evening he and Sonia went into town together. Monica drove them to the station. He had brought the Sunday papers, but she didn’t feel like reading. He sat wondering whether the golfing consultant in psychiatry was her biological father. As if that would matter to anyone except the barrister, who had been egoistic and self-pitying enough to initiate him into his small private hell. He tried to imagine her reaction if he were to tell her. Would she break down? Would she be relieved? She, who had accustomed herself to the role of the family’s unwanted rebel. His secret knowledge increased the distance between them and strengthened his impression of sitting opposite a lonely neglected child.
They exchanged casual remarks interspersed with long pauses, looking out at the lit windows of residential suburbs, the trees bordering the paths beside the railway and the blue strip of the Sound disappearing and reappearing. The lamplight gleamed violet in the dusk and shone through the leaves of the trees. They did not know each other although she was his sister-in-law. The word seemed quite wrong, like a silly hat. She told him to feel free to read the paper if he didn’t feel like talking. He unfolded a section and read haphazardly. He couldn’t concentrate, and at one point when he looked up he found her watching him. She didn’t look away, just smiled. He looked out at the station where the train happened to have stopped and stretched to read the sign above the platform as if he just wanted to see how far they had come.
He was annoyed with himself to have thought of her when he was in bed with Monica. It had only been an image, like one of the slides that sometimes gets into the wrong order in the projector so the series of glimpses of a summer day are suddenly broken by Lea in a yellow raincoat standing with her hand stretched out as if she is pushing at the leaning tower of Pisa. You don’t know how it has got there and hurriedly switch to the next slide. Moreover, she wasn’t in the least attractive, Sonia, sitting opposite him in loose denim trousers and a sweatshirt with a hood. Again he noticed her coltish features, her habit of pulling her sleeves down over her hands and childish way of pronunciation, as if the consonants were choking her. Besides, they had nothing to talk about.
The next day it started to rain. He left the windows open and breathed in the scent of fresh leaves and wet asphalt that blended into the smell of paint, with La Traviata echoing through the empty rooms of the apartment. When he thought about Monica it was not their routine intercourse in the creaking bed he visualised, but her profile in the afternoon sun, the remoteness in her grey eyes as she stood in his bath robe looking out over the Sound, as if contemplating her whole life. Their whole life. There was no difference, her life and theirs, they were one. Suddenly he missed her. He felt like getting up and going to her, untying the robe she had tied so tightly, pulling her to him and putting his hands on her hips. Even though it was merely an image.
He had to turn the music down, he wasn’t sure whether he had really
