Part Three
14
So far it had been a miserable summer. Every time you thought it was getting warm at last, it began to rain and blow again. Monica and Jan had had the right idea, to book a holiday in Lanzarote as early as April, but Robert still felt disappointed over not spending time with Lea when he was on holiday. She said nothing about it on her visits to him, not even when the end of term was approaching, and he suspected she was avoiding the subject to spare his feelings. That made him more dispirited than the thought of being without her. When she came they worked together on the kitchen garden, and one Sunday afternoon, when the sun shone for a change and the temperature climbed to a tolerable minimum of summertime, they went out to the beach to swim.
The water was icy cold and he only took a quick dip. Lea was a good swimmer now. He stood at the water’s edge shivering and watching her swim along the sandbank with sure, regular strokes. She swam over to one of the fishing stakes which were set in a straight row at right angles to the shore, forming an interrupted perspective against the calm expanses of sea and sky. As she held onto the post with one arm and waved to him with the other he felt both happy and sad, and when she came out of the water and waded towards him, tall and shining in her swimsuit, he realised why. It would not be long before he had to part with her, not because she would be catching the train as usual and going back to her mother, but because she would have no more use for either mother or father. It was only a question of a few years before she began to live her own life. They would still see each other, but she would be a guest, when she came. It would no longer be her second home, if in fact it ever had been, his overlarge house in the suburb on the edge of the quiet provincial town in which he had ended up after the divorce, by chance as it seemed to him now.
If there had been a meaning in his life during the many years that had passed it had existed in this girl coming towards him, wading through the cold water and wiping her eyes with her knuckles as she pulled down the corners of her mouth in a comical, troubled grimace. She had been the meaning of it all, anything else had come to seem pale and complicated compared with her. He stood waiting, holding her towel and then wrapping it round her and rubbing her back. She teased him for only having a dip and saucily grabbed at the loose skin on his hips. Hadn’t he better do something about those handles? He put out a hand to tickle her. She leaped away and ran off. He ran after her, but her legs had grown too long for him to catch up with her, and suddenly he felt a stabbing pain in one foot as he tripped and fell. He heard her laugh. She couldn’t go on being the meaning in his life, she would soon be busy enough with her own.
His heel was bleeding and he caught sight of a rotten plank with a bent rusty nail in it. A siding, he thought, as she came towards him. He had driven himself onto a siding. He thought of the quiet house where he sat listening to music every night the whole year round when he got home from the hospital. Should it be Brahms or Bruckner tonight, after he had driven Lea to the station, or Bartók for once? She put a supporting hand under his arm as they went back to the car. He asked her to fetch the first aid box from the boot. She insisted on helping him, and he let her clean the wound with iodine and showed her how to put on a bandage, secretly enjoying her sympathy.
They had brought her bag so they could drive straight from the beach to the station. His heel smarted and throbbed. She sat beside him looking out at the fields and the clouds. The weather was worsening, the light was grey and metallic over the restless corn. Silence fell between them, as it usually did before they parted. The first drops appeared on the windscreen followed by more until he had to switch on the wipers. When he stopped in front of the station she said he didn’t need to go in with her. She sat on for a moment. See you after the holidays, then, she said. Yes, he said, smiling. Take good care of Mum and Jan! She looked at him. Take good care of yourself, she said seriously and kissed his cheek. He watched her as she ran through the rain with her bag over her shoulder. She turned and waved, and he signalled with his headlights. Then she was gone. He could hear the train approaching and started the car again.
He had been to see Lucca every afternoon before going home, and he had remembered to take off his white coat before going into her room, as she had asked him to. What was it she had said? It seemed a strange notion. That she would rather be completely ignorant of what he looked like than have to content herself with knowing he had a white coat on. But she did ask when he went in to her the day after he had lent her his walkman. She asked what he was wearing, and he replied, slightly flurried. Blue shirt, beige trousers. But what kind of blue? He had to think about that. Twilight blue, he said finally, surprising himself at the comparison. Twilight blue, she repeated and smiled. He had made a new tape for her. He had enjoyed choosing the pieces of music and deciding on their order, and it had given him the chance of hearing music he had not listened to in years. Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, he kept to French music and Chopin. She had asked for more Chopin. He spent most of the evening on it.
He always came at the agreed time, when the ray of sunlight shone on her face through the blinds outside the window. He did not switch on the light when it began to rain, she asked him not to, as if it made a difference to her. Then she lay in the semi-darkness listening to the whipping of the drops on the aluminium blinds. He sat down on a chair beside the bed. Her arms and legs were still encapsulated in plaster, but her head was no longer bound up in bandages. It looked almost normal, apart from the stitches in her forehead and the yellow-green bruising that was wearing off, and her glass eyes. He recognised her from the photographs he had seen in the kitchen the day he drove Andreas and Lauritz home in the rain, but she had lost weight, her features had grown sharper.
She seldom mentioned Andreas and Lauritz. He did not ask why she stuck to her decision not to let Andreas visit her, but he could feel she missed her son and suffered because of her own obstinacy. The weeks went by with no word from Andreas, but she did not ask if he had called. Robert assumed he was still in Copenhagen, unless he had gone to Stockholm to try his luck with the exotic designer. He considered asking Lucca if he should contact Andreas, but never got around to it. Something about her silence held him back. She was remarkably silent about the drama that had ended when, drunk and beside herself, she had got into their car to drive to Copenhagen on the wrong side of the motorway.
She did not talk about the life she had lived with Andreas in the house by the woods, which they had transformed from a ruin into the home that now, in a different and more comprehensive sense, lay in ruins. It seemed as if she had completely repressed the fact that she was married and had a child, totally engrossed in the years that had gone before. Robert thought of old people who cannot recollect the immediate past and instead remember details and events from their early years which they thought they had forgotten. But he was not witnessing a loss of memory. She just no longer knew precisely where she was, surrounded by sounds and voices, an indeterminate space where hearing was the only sense by which she could distinguish what was close from what was far off.
She had suddenly been thrown into herself, without her eyes’ firm grip on reality, delivered over to the evasive images of memory. She seemed like someone who is obliged to tell the story from the beginning, try to describe herself as she had once been, ignorant of what awaited her later. Someone who attempts to return to the start and from there follows her own steps, as you do when you have dropped something on a walk and retrace your steps with your eyes fixed on the ground. Without her explaining it he understood, at first with only a vague apprehension, that this was how she had to approach the night when everything in her life crashed into sudden darkness.