He did not come for his son so often any more, but the few times he did she was surprised at how good he was at seeming natural. Her legs started to tremble when she caught sight of him. He even looked into her eyes as he bade her a smiling farewell with the boy on his arm, as if they had never been closer than that. Usually his wife came. She had short hair and looked like a mouse with her pointed nose and receding chin. It seemed a bit strange to greet her, but not as strange as she had feared. The trysts with her husband took place in a world where the mouse-faced woman did not exist. Just as Lucca did not exist either in the safe, everyday world in which she was only the assistant who looked after the woman’s child.
The mahogany bed in the quiet villa was a white island in the twilight, an enchanted island where you forgot what you had left behind. A secret island where you could live a whole life without becoming a day older than you were when you went ashore. He was only a dark figure on the white sheet in the dusk, and she felt she put everything she had known behind her when she slowly undressed before him and felt the air from the open window on her skin. She closed her eyes and he caressed her cautiously until she could wait no longer. When at last he penetrated her it felt as if she split in two lengthways and her limbs and bones parted from each other, light and delicate as birds’ bones. She imagined they were held together by his hard sinewy arms, that she would float away on the wind if he let go, and she clung to him so that he should hold her still tighter and pierce still deeper inside her and split her into even smaller, even more splintered and vanishing fragments.
One evening when she lay listening to the water running onto the bathroom tiles, she heard a muted sobbing from in there. She went into the corridor and opened the door. He was crouching under the shower with his head between his knees and his hands folded around his neck. The water trickled down his back, which shuddered rhythmically in time with his sobs. She squatted down beside him and was about to put her arm round his shoulders, but something made her stop, she didn’t know what. Maybe it was the sight of a grown man sitting on the tiled floor weeping. He stood up, found a towel and went into the bedroom. She sat on the bed watching him dress. When he had laced up his shoes he said they would have to stop meeting. He was suddenly very calm. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. What? He glanced at her briefly. Nothing… She followed him with her eyes from the window as he disappeared on his bicycle with his badminton racket sticking out of the sports bag on his luggage carrier. The next day she called the nursery school and handed in her notice.
She went up to the holiday cottage that afternoon. Ivan sat reading in the garden. He had on a faded T-shirt and sandals, almost playing the part of an ageing hippie with a haircut, and not the dynamic advertising chief who talked like an energetic pilot. She had never seen him with a book before. He got to his feet when she went into the garden, not specially surprised, it seemed. He explained, almost apologetically, that Else was working late and would probably come the next day. But she would stay? He had bought a large steak, there would be enough for two. Actually he was one of those people who could get a bit sick of fish. Lucca smiled, and he looked inquiringly at her, awkwardly waving the book he still held in his hand. It was a yellowing paperback, he had found it on the book shelf, The Outsider by Camus. He hadn’t read it for years. He had read a lot when he was young, he added, as if frightened she might not believe him.
He was different, more subdued than usual, friendly without seeming to launch a charm offensive. It struck her that he behaved like someone at home with himself. They were both at home, but they behaved very politely, as if they were also each other’s guest. He opened a bottle of white wine, she brought glasses. They sat in the garden talking of Camus. The best thing in the book was the beginning, he thought. The descriptions of an oddly stupefied life, the heat and the sea, the women, the monotony. The feeling of being anonymous, as if everything was at one and the same time very close and yet distant. That was how he had felt for years, until he met her mother.
He had worked and worked, he hadn’t really done much else, there hadn’t been time for private life, nor had it interested him. In fact nothing had interested him. Maybe his work, when he was immersed in it, but otherwise… He had known various women, but each time he had let it fall apart. He had had the feeling of being adrift, as if in a boat without oars, taken by the current, just on and on, he had no idea where.
He had never believed he was suited to living in a permanent relationship. Perhaps he wasn’t, he added with a smile, time would tell. He looked down at his glass, embarrassed. It wasn’t always easy, he went on after a pause. Her mother was demanding, but she knew everything about that, of course. And when you both had a past… they weren’t so young any more. Enthusiasm alone… he smiled again and left the sentence hanging in the air.
Lucca looked at him, attentive to every single word and gesture. She felt her gaze made him shy, he dared only respond to it for a second at a time. The rest of the time he looked ahead or studied the creases in his trousers, smoothing them thoughtfully with his palm. For the first time she glimpsed what Else must have seen in him behind the façade of self-confidence, shaving lotion and expensive habits. Something lonely and unguarded which at moments came in sight on his face, almost innocent in his appeal for understanding or at least acceptance.
He opened another bottle at dinner time. They ate outside as they did when Else was there. He asked her what she was going to do. She didn’t know what to say. Travel, she said. Maybe she wanted to be an actor. It sounded naïve. She had not really thought through the idea herself, and Else had not been particularly encouraging when she heard that her daughter was thinking of repeating the foundered ambitions of her own youth. She did not consider it the right thing for Lucca and asked what made her think she had any acting talent? But Ivan seemed to take her seriously.
She had radiance, anyway. He didn’t know anything about drama, but he knew something about radiance, about presence. She seemed very mature, he felt, older than she was. But luckily she was still too young to mind being told that. He smiled and winked at her. Lucca was about to get irritated at his wink and the way he pronounced the word presence when he asked why she didn’t go and look for her father. She said she didn’t even know where he lived. But she could probably find out! It was important for her, more so than she might realise. He had eyes in his head…
He looked at her, and now it was Lucca’s turn to look down. But who was he to sit here and talk twaddle, he went on reassuringly and started to talk about his childhood. His parents had sent him to boarding school when they were divorced. His mother was said to have found someone else. His father prevented him from seeing her but he didn’t discover that until he had grown up and it was too late. Imagine living in hatred of your mother, he said, and then finding you had been wrong. Again she caught a glimpse of something vulnerable in his eyes, as if a boarding-school boy stood on tiptoe inside him, in shorts and with grass on his knees, squinting through the cracks in the hardened mask his face had turned into with the years.
He had bought strawberries. He opened the third bottle of wine, although she protested. Had their wedding been ghastly? She shrugged her shoulders and let him fill her glass. It had been Else’s idea. She put her feet up on the chair and leaned back, supporting her glass against her knees. She felt drowsy in a pleasant way. To have a white wedding, he went on, lifting his glass. She thought of Else’s thighs, bulging out in the bare patch between her stockings and suspender belt when they met in the kitchen on her wedding night. He looked over at the edge of the woods before drinking.