He could well have done without such an exhibition, himself. He sought her eyes again. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, sipping her wine. He perfectly understood why she had made herself scarce. He himself had felt like heading off just then, he smiled, that is, if it hadn’t been for Else. But she had been so happy that day. Lucca nodded. The strawberries were big and dark red, she ate them with her fingers and bit them off at the stalk. The juice made her lips sting slightly. He asked if she would like coffee. She said she felt like an early night. It had been nice, he went on. Yes, she replied, and met his eyes. He thought they understood each other better.
Not until she lay down did she realise how drunk she was. The air was hot and stuffy in the little room. She opened the window and threw off the duvet, felt the coolness on her naked body, curled up with her knees under her chin as she had done when as a little girl she had crept up close to Giorgio in the mornings. The wine made her dizzy although she lay quite still. She felt the room turning slowly around her, if she herself wasn’t turning, as if she was in a boat without oars, adrift on the whirling currents that carried her along in circles, on and on through the half-dark summer night.
She thought of the weeping badminton player under the shower and of his strong arms that had crushed her and at the same time held her together so she should not break apart and be blown away like the almost weightless remains of a disintegrated bird. It already seemed so remote, something she had long since left behind. She turned and turned, floating unceasingly on the current, and with a little, strangely happy pain it came to her that she had felt his hands for the last time when she lay like this curled around herself, as he lay beside her with his tensed stomach against her spine and pressed his warm, hard cock between her thighs.
But it was neither his hands nor his cock she felt and it was not like gliding from a doze into a dream. It was like awakening, not to reality, but from a misty dream to one that was crude and sharp, when, as if struck by an electric shock, she turned round and kicked. Ivan fell on the floor with a crash, pale in the dim light and with an erection that looked both comical and macabre in the midst of his flaccid nakedness. She had pushed herself into the furthest corner of the bed and pressed against the wooden wall with the duvet held tightly around her. Out, she screamed, out, get out! He rose, swayed and looked at her in despair before going out and closing the door behind him. She remained in her corner, shaking all over. Soon afterwards she heard his car start and the gravel on the road crunch beneath the tyres as he drove away. When she began to breathe calmly she got out of bed and dressed.
She walked along the cycle path through the plantation although it was a detour, shivering among the spruce trees in the dim light. When she came down to the harbour she looked anxiously around her, but could not see Ivan’s car anywhere. No one was about. She sat on a bench near the ferry quay and looked across at the fishmongers’ empty window-panes, where a crooked little moon shone above the marble counter and the posts along the quay and their floating shadows on the undulations of the calm water. The last ferry had sailed. She was afraid of falling asleep while she waited, and it was like a cut in a film, dreamless and without transition when the sun roused her and she rose, dazed, from the bench and saw the cars boarding the ferry, clattering over the steel ramp.
She put her hands on the varnished rail and felt the faint quivering of the engine’s vibrations drumming through the hull. Slowly the wake opened its fan of foam in the increasing distance from the wharf beneath the little red lighthouse that had always made her think of a clown in a red jersey, with a white stripe on his stomach and his clown’s nose in the clouds. She recalled how she had stood between Giorgio and Else screwing up her eyes against the reflections on the water, like needles in a chaos of flashes. She remembered that it had been like travelling for real, far away from everything she knew.
Her mother never found out what had happened. Lucca waited before going home to the villa until she was sure Else was at work. She was thinking of the last postcard she had received from Giorgio a few days after her birthday. It was as brief as ever and written in the usual careless handwriting. The card showed an early Renaissance painting, an altarpiece with the Madonna and child, blue-white and with set features, slim, with narrow eyes, against a golden background. The card had been stamped in Florence like the others he had sent in recent years. He probably lived there. Anyway, it was all she had to go on.
She packed a bag with essentials and left a note to Else saying she was going away for a week with a friend. Then she found her passport, went to the bank and withdrew all her money. That evening she was in a train travelling south. She changed in Hamburg and slept through most of Germany, leaning on her bag. In the morning she arrived at Munich where she changed again. A few hours later she was gazing out at the spruce-clad slopes of the Tyrol.
10
The brakes squealed underneath her, the train stopped abruptly and she was jerked forwards. There was blood all over her thighs. A droning voice from the loudspeakers drowned out her sobs with its list of town names. The sun shone horizontally through the frosted window glass of the toilet, golden like the background to the stiff-necked Virgin Mary and her chubby child on Giorgio’s postcard. In her haste she had forgotten her period was due. She had put down the leaden feeling in her stomach to the shock, the delayed anger and sense of being left completely on her own. She had woken up in a tunnel through the Alps feeling a stickiness in her crotch, and cursed herself when the train emerged into the light and she saw blood trickling down her legs under her skirt. She placed her jacket over the dark patch on the seat and rummaged feverishly in her bag for a pair of clean briefs.
The toilet stank and the floor was soiled around the lavatory pan where male passengers had stood swaying in time to the movements of the train. She threw the blood-soaked briefs in the refuse bin, pulled a handful of tissues from the holder on the wall and stuffed them into the clean briefs, but she bled through them at once. She had sat there bleeding for the best part of an hour when the train stopped. Several times impatient hands had rattled the door handle. For the past twenty-four hours she had eaten nothing but a dry ham sandwich in Munich station, and had thrown half of that away because the bread swelled like a sponge in her mouth. Hunger, pains and loss of blood made her tremble, and her forehead was covered with cold drops of sweat.
The train did not arrive in Milan until the evening. Her legs buckled under her when she tried to stand up. She took off the long-sleeved blouse she wore under her denim jacket, and tied it like a loin cloth under her skirt, buttoned the jacket over her bare torso and looked at herself in the mirror. She resembled a pregnant drug addict, pale and sweating, with red circles round her eyes and a swollen stomach. Her head swam as if she was doped when she climbed down to the platform clutching her bag.
She found the way to the ladies’ cloakroom with a bag from the station pharmacy. A bent old woman in a blue overall was washing the floor with a gigantic mop. Her face was dark and wrinkled and her eyes were big and black beneath the headscarf she had pulled right over her forehead. She looked Lucca up and down and shook her head, smiling. Half her teeth were missing and her cooing voice sounded more like that of an infant than an old woman.