A few years after their affair Sonia had married a young Danish solicitor she had met in New York. The barrister and his wife were extremely pleased. The young couple were married in Holmens Church in Copenhagen, and the wedding breakfast was held at the Langelinie Pavilion restaurant on the Lakes. Robert had not seen Sonia since he had gone to the airport with her and kissed her goodbye with assumed intensity, as if their shared afternoons had really meant a lot to him. He had to admit that she looked disturbingly good in the fussy wedding gown, her hair artificially piled. Her coltish air had gone, and although she still talked like a child with strongly voiced s’s and a lazy, clumsily articulated diction, nothing was left of the Bohemian slut he had allowed to seduce him.
It was a wearing feast, and the speeches were too long, full of jokes meant to give a thorough or moving portrayal of the bride or bridegroom. In between he conversed with his neighbour at table without paying attention to his own words. She was a stewardess and interested in tarot cards. Meanwhile he kept his eye on Sonia, pluming herself like a beautiful bird in a nest of white. He fantasised that at any moment she might take off from the table and fly away over the heads of the amazed, well-behaved guests, out the window and on over the harbour until she was only a white fluttering spot that could be taken for any roving seagull.
During the meal he drank a good deal to relieve his boredom as the stewardess explained the significance of the tarot cards to him. When he glanced now and again at Sonia he felt surprised over having tumbled around with his wife’s half-sister on his daughter’s mattress. As she sat there beside her husband, radiant and feminine in a completely grown-up manner, she was certainly very attractive, rather like the beautiful women in fashion magazines you offer a fleeting glance before leafing on, because they are after all only pictures.
He had been relieved when she went back to New York and he was just as relieved to see her married. Everything that took her further out of reach seemed to affirm that their affair had been a misunderstanding. They had had nothing to say to each other, all they had in common was their familial relationship, and even if their meeting had been a chance encounter, it still resembled a kind of traffic accident. The wrong woman in the wrong arms, that was the sort of thing that happened when the head lost control of the body. How was it to know the difference of its own accord?
He came on her after coffee in the cloakroom in front of the lavatories. She was alone. He said he was glad to see her. She said she had missed him. He didn’t believe that, but he smiled, nevertheless. She took a step forward, her white skirt meeting the creases of his trousers, and put a hand on his shoulder. It was an obvious invitation, and he kissed her, wondering how to escape. She took his hand and led him through the door of the women’s toilet. Luckily no one was in there. She pulled him into one of the cubicles, locked the door behind them and laughed softly as she half closed her eyes. He kissed the bride, what else could he do when they were standing there in the cramped cubicle? She unbuttoned her dress and pulled out her breasts, smiling and looking at him earnestly. They were bigger and more taut than he remembered them. I’m pregnant, she whispered. He could not decide whether her tone was triumphant or sarcastic. He kissed her breasts, she sighed. Her wide skirt whispered drily against the walls. He heard someone come into the toilet and the lock turned in one of the other cubicles. They stood quite still, as Sonia, with a hand on the hard bulge behind his fly, held his gaze.
15
He walked out to the point. The sand crackled in thin flakes beneath his feet. On it there were still traces of the rain, myriads of small craters. There was a smell of rotting seaweed. The cloud masses shifted slowly as they swelled and bulged, grey-blue with white edges where the sun touched them. The sea was blue-black under the horizon, closer to land the surface turned into a pale, milky blue. It resembled a bare wide floor, dull and granulated with small ruffles except where a current change left its smooth trace. Big seagulls landed on the beach and stalked off with arrogant, black eyes. Chief gulls, he thought, feeling intrusive when he obliged them to take off with indolent wing beats as he approached.
He looked at his watch. Jacob would be waiting in the changing room. There would not be any tennis that day. Robert couldn’t stand the challenging, self-satisfied expression when his eyebrows spoke meaningfully, merely waiting for Robert to pump him, duly impressed, about the passionate gym teacher with big boobs. This was the first time he had stood him up. In general it was a long time since he had stood anyone up. He was always there, ready and willing in his sparkling white coat, prepared to deal with the functional break-downs of his fellow beings when they were wheeled in, anxious or mistrustful. Mostly they came to trust him, patient, professional Robert with his cultured weakness for romantic symphonies. He stopped to light a cigarette, bent his head and shielded the lighter flame with his jacket. Like a sleeping bird, it occurred to him, with its beak buried in its wing.
Had he quite simply been unlucky? A player among players, who place their bets, win or lose? Was that how he had ended up on his siding, on a deserted shore, in a white coat at a provincial hospital, on a sofa in front of a panorama window looking out on his designed plot of landscaped, hedged-in nature? Was it merely one of the unpredictable results of love, a fortuitous outcome of its meaningless and inevitable power to change bodies and faces about and distribute them further. Once more he meditated on how far, how immeasurably far he was from Monica’s blushing tenderness under the blanket in the Alps when she called him about Lea’s arrangements in a practical, measured tone. As if Lea was not their daughter but merely a mutual task to be undertaken with suitable care and efficiency. It was clearly of no importance that she was their joint flesh and blood, as they say. It was just a trick their bodies had played on them, his microscopic tadpole that had turned into a little folded frog in her womb, a complete little person in embryo.
Once they had been close. They had known each other so well, but with the passage of time he had come to confuse his knowledge of her, crystallised by habit, with the particular moments when he felt her face loosen up and reveal what she was like inside. He knew more about her than anyone else, but it had still not been her, he thought now, walking by himself on the heavy sand, heading for the point. She had shown herself to him in the way she had grown to be, but it was not really herself he had seen and heard. Only the outward echo of her being, the reflections in her tone of voice and her manner, all the little quirks and habits of behaviour. Only rarely had he caught a glimpse of the person she was behind everything she had become.
He visualised her standing on the beach in his bath robe, her back to the low sun, gazing at the waves’ shining foam. Or at home by the window, pausing with the hot iron raised over a flat blouse sleeve with sharp folds, looking at something outside. That was how he remembered her, halted in her movement on her way through the days, self-forgetful, as if he had suddenly become invisible and free to spy. He had almost had to sneak up on her at unguarded moments to track down what had originally aroused his feelings.