The following days were warm, the clouds dispersed, and the high pressure transformed the sky into a pale blue desert stretching all the way into town. The heat made the air quiver over the asphalt of the motorway. The wind blew in through the open windows and pulled at his shirt sleeves, and he felt light and empty-headed as the road signs increased in perspective and abruptly flew over the windscreen. He listened to The Magic Flute and quite forgot why he had set off. It was a long time since he had been in Copenhagen, and when he passed the south harbour he recalled all the times in the past when he had returned after a trip in the country, relieved to see the city towers again, the sparkling water of the harbour and the cranes above the goods trains’ marshalling yard. He could leave his job, sell the house and move back into town. He could do whatever he liked. What was he waiting for?
Noisy pop music issued from behind the door. He knocked loudly. She was as brown as cocoa and unnaturally blonde, the woman in the black slip who opened the door. Her dyed hair was short and stuck out untidily around her pinched, sun-tanned face. She looked at him enquiringly as she squeezed up her eyes to avoid the smoke from the cigarette between her lips. She had a small artificial pearl on one nostril. The apartment was at the rear of a block in the city centre and consisted of one large room with vertical wooden beams in the centre. Piles of clothes were scattered on the furniture and the unmade double bed, and the confusion of fashion garments, empty pizza boxes, used coffee cups and randomly dropped objects seemed to go with the drumming rhythm pumping out of the loudspeakers. She must have been the same age as Lucca. The bangles on her wrists jingled when she removed the cigarette and threw out a hand to show the way. She apologised for the mess and shouted to Lauritz, who was on the sofa watching television. It didn’t occur to her to turn down the music. A sun-tanned man stood at one of the windows wearing nothing but briefs, talking on a mobile. He threw a glance at Robert and nodded curtly before turning his back on them. He was athletically built and absent-mindedly caressed the muscles on one upper arm as he spoke.
Lauritz did not react, totally hypnotised by Tom and Jerry chasing each other across the screen. The woman with dyed hair looked Robert over as she called the boy. On the telephone he had introduced himself as a friend, but he could feel she was wondering if he was something else and more, this respectable substitute uncle from the provinces in his checked shirt and moccasins. He had asked for Andreas when he phoned. The woman had said he was away travelling. At last Lauritz raised his head and caught sight of them. Robert was not sure the boy recognised him, but on the other hand he did not seem shy, rather resigned, as he slid off the sofa and came to shake his hand. The woman with dyed hair walked in front of them back to the door. The man in briefs was still talking with his back turned. Robert said he would bring Lauritz back in the early evening. She turned round in the open doorway. Was it true that Lucca would never see again? How dreadful… She smiled at the boy and ruffled his hair before closing the door after them. Lauritz smoothed his hair as they walked downstairs.
Robert asked him if he could remember the day he and his father had driven home from the supermarket in Robert’s car. The day it rained. Lauritz thought about it. Then he asked where his father was. Hadn’t his father told him where he had gone? He couldn’t remember. As Robert drove north he glanced at the boy now and then in the rear mirror. He could only see his forehead and eyes watching him expectantly. He wished Lea had been there. He remembered how she had led the boy round the garden as if he was her little brother, when Andreas had come to deliver the leg of lamb that had been left in the car.
She had called the previous day. He was mowing the lawn and the noise of the mower almost drowned out the telephone. She laughed at his breathless voice when he answered at last. She was calling from the airport on the way to Lanzarote. He was sweating, his T-shirt stuck to his shoulder blades. Her laugh was the same as the week before when he ran after her on the beach and stumbled. He looked down at his trainers as he listened to her voice. The toes were covered with grass clippings. He wanted to say something to her but couldn’t think what. He asked her to send a postcard. She said she would and kissed the mouthpiece at the other end. It sounded funny.
Lauritz had fallen asleep when they drove into the parking place in front of the orthopaedic hospital. Robert called to him softly until he woke with a start and looked around him, rosy-cheeked and confused. As they walked towards the entrance he let go of Robert’s hand and started gathering pine cones from under the pine trees. Lucca smiled when he gave her the hard, prickly cones. Robert stood where he had stopped at the end of the terrace a nurse had directed them to. She sat in the sun on one of the deckchairs. Seen from a distance she might have been any woman smiling at her son, looking at him through her sunglasses. Lauritz climbed onto her lap and pushed his head under her chin. Robert walked up to them and the sound of his steps on the terrace floor made her lift her face. The boy looked at him watchfully. Thank you, she said. It was kind of you. She was suddenly formal, she had not been like that on the telephone. It was nothing, he said. No, was all she replied. He said he would go for a walk on the beach.
There were a lot of people there, and he felt much too dressed up and conspicuous among the anonymous bodies lying in rows in the sun. He sat down some way up the beach and took off his shoes and socks. The shrill cries of children rang out and then were swallowed by the deep sound of the breakers. The light dazzled him, reflected in the water that ran back before another wave gathered itself and slumped down on the wet sand. Kullen’s low cliffs were blue and misty, and now and again he saw a little flash over the Sound when the sun struck a passing car window in Sweden.
Robert lit a cigarette. He had not been here since Monica and he were divorced. This was the view she had stood gazing at as she smoked, one late afternoon when the other beach visitors had gone home. Yet it seemed quite a different place. There was nothing left but disconnected impressions, and he was not even sure he remembered them precisely, those fleeting moments of closeness, like coming suddenly out of the shade and meeting the sunlight. He had believed you could build on that kind of thing, and now they were in Lanzarote.
He sat there for half an hour. Occasionally he looked at the hospital’s white functionalist building, formerly a fashionable seaside hotel. He recalled the story Monica’s mother had always told when she’d had something to drink, about how the barrister had proposed to her one evening there on the dance floor, between two dances, poised and romantic in his white dinner jacket. Might he have chosen her for her dress? And if so, why not? Just as love had its consequences, so love itself was a consequence of every possible and impossible thing, small or large. He brushed the sand from his feet and stood up, put on his shoes and pushed his socks into his pocket. Small things holding some mysterious transformative power often proved surprisingly influential on one’s imagination. The luxurious way a skirt swung around a girl’s legs in time to the tunes of the age. A modestly blushing smile beneath a woollen blanket in the Alps. A white hand lazily pushing the button on an old radio and a dreamy gaze at the snow under the lamps. No more was needed.
Lucca was still on the terrace. Lauritz lay on the floor rolling his pine cones. Her long face with its high cheek-bones and straight nose seemed both melancholy and arrogant, as if shaped by an old, indomitable yet never satisfied hunger. She sat with her face lifted to the sun and a faint smile around her mouth. He did not know if the heat was making her smile or the sound of his step and the deck chair giving way beneath him.