Lucca had to ask herself how this same woman could have fallen in love with her father. At dinner she mentioned Giorgio several times, but Ivan did not allow himself to be affected. He questioned them with interest about his predecessor, and although his cold-bloodedness irritated Lucca, she managed to enjoy seeing Else squirm as she answered his questions in subdued tones. No, they had no contact with him apart from an occasional postcard and a present every few years when he remembered Lucca’s birthday. That’s very strange, Ivan thought, giving Lucca a sympathetic glance that infuriated her.
Else laughed a lot when she was with Ivan, and it was no longer the ironical, at times scornful laughter as when she and her women friends sat in the kitchen drinking white wine and telling stories about the stupidity of men. It was open, unrestrained laughter, as if above all she was laughing at herself. Her laughter often left her smiling unconsciously, lost in wonder at what had happened to her. Ivan made her laugh, as Lucca faintly remembered her laughing when Giorgio picked her up and carried her out into the cold waves, kicking and flinging out her arms and legs.
She was thoughtful when she came down to the kitchen in the mornings. Previously she had talked like a machine-gun. Now she was the one who, distrait and delayed, looked up from her mug of coffee and asked Lucca to repeat what she had just said. Lucca thought that perhaps it didn’t matter who made her mother happy, and the thought confused her. Over the years Else had known so many men, one face had succeeded another like the numbers on a wheel of fortune clicking past the little peg that always reminded Lucca of the fuse on a huge firecracker. As if the whole tombola and its contents of gigantic teddy bears would explode in crackling fireworks if the wheel of fortune revolved too fast and started to shoot out sparks. But the wheel didn’t bolt, it stopped at Ivan. He was to be the lucky teddy bear Else could hug at night.
They were married, in church, the year after Lucca’s matriculation. She felt that she had landed up in the middle of a film under production and was forced to stay in the pew because the camera kept running. Incredulously she watched her mother in the low-cut, slit wedding dress of cream Thai silk as she walked alone up the aisle, with Ivan waiting at the altar, shining with sweat in his dress-suit. In the past, when she sat in the kitchen with her hennaed friends, Else always had a ruthless comment at the ready on bourgeois marriage as disguised prostitution. Now she herself had taken to it like another prize cunt in gift-wrap.
At the reception Lucca was surprised to find she knew so few of the guests. Most of them were Ivan’s friends, but many seemed more like business contacts than what one understands as friends. At Lucca’s table the talk was of segments and communications strategy. She slipped away during the bridal waltz and didn’t come home until late. Else sat on the kitchen table with a cigarette in one hand and a sausage sandwich in the other, in her white corsage and white silk stockings and suspender belt. Her thighs bulged out in the bare patch above the stockings and her bra was so tight it looked as if she had four breasts. Laughter bubbled up in Lucca’s throat, she could not stop it. Else looked stiffly at her for a moment, deathly pale, then she put the sandwich down on the worktop, jumped off the table and slapped her.
Lucca couldn’t remember ever having been beaten. Wordlessly she left the kitchen and went up to her room. Her cheek still burned and she regretted her cruel laughter. The next morning she apologised to Else. Ivan had gone to work and they sat over their coffee mugs as usual. Else stroked her cheek, the same cheek. She must try to understand, even if it might be hard. Else looked at her with tired, sorrowful eyes. She wanted this. She was going to try for happiness, and no-one, not even Lucca, would stop her.
That summer Lucca stayed at the villa as little as possible, she often slept with a girlfriend. She took a job as an assistant at a nursery school. None of her friends were in town, she was on her own, Else and Ivan spent most of the time at the holiday cottage. They drove into town together every day and Ivan fetched her from Radio House in the evening. Lucca hardly ever saw them. The school holidays had begun and there were only a few children left at the nursery school. It was an easy job, she spent most of the time at the playground sitting in the sun smoking with the teaching staff, while the children took care of themselves.
One afternoon it was her turn to lock up. One of the children was still waiting to be fetched, a boy of three. He anxiously asked where his father was. She took out a puzzle for him. In the end he started to cry. She sat cuddling the sniffing child until finally his father turned up, red in the face and full of excuses. He had been at an important meeting.
She had not seen him before. Usually the mother fetched the boy. He might be any age between thirty and forty, his short hair was grizzled, but his face looked young. He picked up the boy and stretched out his free hand. Apparently he thought they should say goodbye properly now he had let her wait so long. He fetched the boy on the following days as well, and every time he went out of his way to ask if it had been a good day, smiling shyly.
He was good-looking, broad-shouldered with a narrow waist, and there was something lithe about his movements, but she did not give much thought to that before she met him one Saturday afternoon, cycling. His hair was wet and stood on end and he wore a sleeveless vest so you could see his brown, sinewy upper arms. A badminton racket stuck out of a bag on his luggage carrier. He had been playing, he said needlessly, awkward because of the unexpected meeting, then plucked up courage and invited her for a beer.
His shyness reassured her, although he was twice as old as she was. He seemed like a contemporary who had happened to be born much earlier. He turned out to be easy to talk to, and he smiled boyishly at nothing. Later on she remembered him for his restrained strength, as if he was afraid of hurting her. It was the first time she had had an affair with a man who was so much older than herself.
It lasted a month. He visited her in the evening once or twice a week, and he always remembered to have a shower before cycling home. They had the villa to themselves, but the risk of Else or Ivan happening to turn up only made her nervous and still more impatient when she was waiting for him. They used the mahogany bed in Else and Ivan’s room, where Else and Giorgio had slept in their time and where she had crept into her father’s warmth under the duvet on Sunday mornings. She liked thinking of that when she looked at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door, infatuated and marvelling as she sat there astride a strange, married man in the selfsame bed.
In the days that passed between their meetings she felt she was moving in a different world. The dangerous and dramatic world where each of them carried the secret of the other. She thought of him practically all the time, both when she was alone and in the playground listening with half an ear to what the teachers were saying. She watched his son running around among the other children, knowing nothing of what his father got up to with her in a strange house when he had kissed him goodnight and cycled off with his racket. Was she in love? She did not know. She always remembered him somewhat differently from what he was when they were once again in Else’s bed. She felt more in love with him when they were not together and she cycled through town alone, surrounded by the invisible aura of their secret.