They were silent, you could hear the sea, but only as a muted soughing beneath the staccato, clicking sound of the bristly scales on the cones Lauritz was rolling over the terrace floor. One of them landed at her feet, she bent forward and picked it up. Her fingertips investigated the hard shells along the edges. What had Andreas had to say? He has gone away, said Robert and paused. I think he is in Stockholm, he went on. Stockholm, she repeated. Yes, he probably was… Lauritz came up to her, she passed him the cone. He asked when she was coming home. She brushed the hair back from her forehead and pushed the unruly lock behind her ear. I don’t know, she said, stretching out her hand. The boy bent his face so her fingers could brush his cheek. He kneeled on the floor again and threw down the pine cones one after the other.
Had he got a cigarette? He offered her one and noticed how surely her hand, after a moment’s fumbling, found the pack and coaxed out a cigarette. She took hold of his wrist when she heard him ignite his lighter and bent her face so her hair fell in front of her forehead again and came dangerously close to the flame. He lifted up the lock with his free hand as she lit her cigarette. She leaned back quickly and blew out smoke, and he noticed her cheeks were slightly flushed, but that might be owing to the sun. It had reached the tops of the pine trees around the parking place, and the shadow of the terrace parapet formed a bluish triangle on the blinding white end wall. The wind made the needles of the pine trees sway in unison and moved the ash from the cigarettes over the floor tiles so it spread and took off in whirls of grey flakes. She didn’t really know where she was, he thought. Lauritz had climbed into a deckchair a little way off. He had a pine cone in his hand and looked out in front of him, it wasn’t clear what he was watching.
You haven’t told me anything about yourself, she said. I am always the one who talks. Always, he thought. Had they spent so much time together already? He brushed ash from his knee. Where should he begin? She turned towards him. Wherever he liked… He looked into her dark lenses, duplicating two identical twins each in his check shirt, both bent forwards, each with a cigarette in his fingers.
He knocked several times, but no one came. He knocked again, harder. There was complete silence from behind the door. Lauritz had sat down on the top step. One by one he let his pine cones tumble down the stairs. Robert tried to remember what he had said to the woman with dyed hair. He was sure he had arranged to bring the boy back in the early evening, but as the minutes went by he began to doubt. He sat down on the step beside Lauritz. Maybe she had forgotten, maybe the music had drowned out his voice. Lauritz dug him in the side with a finger. He said he was hungry. Robert looked at him. The boy’s eyes seemed older than their soft, downy surroundings. They waited patiently to know what he was planning.
They went to an Indian restaurant in the same street. Lauritz only wanted rice. As he ate he gazed around him, fascinated by the gold-painted, oriental arches of the interior, cut out of plywood and lit with mauve bulbs. Did India look like that? More or less, replied Robert and to pass the time began to tell him Kipling’s story about the civet cat. When Lauritz had finished with his rice it looked as if it had snowed on the cloth around his plate. Robert went out to call the woman with dyed hair and the muscle man. A well-educated woman’s voice answered. No contact with the mobile at present. It was nearly half past eight. He thought of what he had told Lucca about himself, about Monica and Lea. He felt he had said too much. He stood gazing blankly at the mosaic of numbers on the telephone, considering what to do with Lauritz. Then he lifted the receiver again and called his mother. She sounded surprised, he had not spoken to her for several weeks. He asked if he might call in and explained the situation to her as briefly as he could. It sounded muddled to him. When they were in the car Lauritz asked where the big girl was. Robert told him she was his daughter. Were there any civet cats in Lanzarote? Robert didn’t think there were.
The boy fell asleep on the sofa where Robert’s mother had lain reading every evening for decades. They sat on her little balcony looking out over the railway lines and the marina further away, beneath the heating station’s red-brick colossus. Did he usually drive his patients’ children around? He smiled wryly. The sky was violet blue over the Sound, and the remains of daylight glowed pale on the rails and the forest of masts and tall thin chimneys. She asked about Lea. When he replied, she fell silent. She had never said what she really thought about the divorce. She had liked Monica, they had had good talks, but she had not been all that sympathetic when he told her Monica wanted a divorce. Nor had she condemned her daughter-in-law when he told her about the morning he arrived back too early from his trip to Oslo and almost surprised her in Jan’s arms. In her opinion the episode belonged to those chance misfortunes which should not in themselves be given too much weight, and she was probably right. But her silence had had the effect of a reproach. Did she think it was all his fault? She couldn’t possibly know about his affair with Sonia. What had she seen? He had never asked her.
She looked old now, her face hung from her cheekbones and her chin in wrinkled bags, and the masculine spectacle frames seemed larger than ever. She picked up her coffee cup with a slow, slightly shaky hand and steadied the edge with her upper lip while she drank. Her eternal coffee. He had made coffee for her every morning from the time he was ten until he left home. On Sunday he had even brought it to her in bed, black as tar with masses of sugar. It was her only extravagance apart from her insatiable consumption of nineteenth-century novels. I don’t feel human until I get a cup of coffee, she would groan when she went into the kitchen in the morning, drunk with sleep she towered in the doorway, rubbing her face with her big red hands. A man’s hands, cracked, with short nails and prominent veins.
He had to make his sandwiches himself, and from early on he learned to do his own washing. She was too tired when she got home from the canteen. They shared the housework on Sunday afternoons when the others were playing football in the courtyard. She frequently sighed but otherwise she did not complain. He did what he could to avoid being a nuisance, and he never complained about the clothes she bought him once or twice a year when the sales were on. She bought summer clothes for him in the autumn and winter clothes when summer was approaching, always the cheapest you could get, they were really ghastly, of course. He was ashamed of his clothes and he was ashamed of her, and he was ashamed of being ashamed.
When he grew tired of lying in bed in the afternoons grieving over the loss of Ana, he gradually began to realise that it was not only love that had made him suffer so, but self-disgust as well. And still later, after he had married Monica, it struck him that there had been an almost tangible connection between the two emotions. With her aristocratic airs and exotic beauty Ana had made him feel a pariah. He who had writhed when he had to go to school wearing the wrong kind of trousers. It had been as clear as it was futile that she was the very one to deliver him from the curse.
But her eastern European home had not only been the gloomy background that emphasised her aristocratic and wonderful pallor when finally, one evening with snow falling outside, he was permitted to hold her face between his hands. He had continued going there long after he should have realised it was hopeless. One afternoon after another he had tea with the clarinettist while he waited for her. He accepted the humiliation merely for the sake of listening to classical records with the kind man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a quaint accent. It had been a more inviting place to be, and he had preferred it to his mother’s two-and-a-half room apartment with its view of the heating station and passing trains.