While Robert drove down the motorway with the sleeping Lauritz on the back seat he asked himself whether his mother with her pinching and scraping had actually wanted to punish herself because she had a child with the wrong man, when the right one had thrown her over. It was nothing special, nor did she feel that she herself was, and looking back he suspected that in her heart, with all her frugality she had intended to economise herself into extinction. Her total lack of egoism had not prevented her becoming slightly misanthropic. In her view no human being was anything very special. But she had also found a strange, anonymous freedom when she sat on her balcony and now and then raised her eyes from one of her novels to watch the trains go by.
18
Luckily Lea had left some cornflakes at the bottom of the packet. There were enough for one portion, and the boy looked on approvingly as Robert gave him breakfast on the terrace. He had slept in Lea’s room. When Robert went to wake him in the morning he was lying with an arm around one of her old teddy bears, kept for sentimental reasons. Could he remember being here before? Lauritz looked around and thought. He could remember playing table tennis with Lea and digging in the garden. He asked when he was going home. Later on today, Robert replied without knowing what he was talking about. He went to get Lea’s Tintin books and brought one of the white plastic chairs onto the lawn where the sun was shining. He took off his bath robe, his body was quite white. Lea was right, he ought to do something about those handles. The problem was he couldn’t really be bothered. He sipped his coffee, looking at the strange boy bending over the table, absorbed in interpreting the little pictures where Tintin and Captain Haddock escaped from one scrape after another with a mixture of chance, optimism and adroitness.
He closed his eyes. It was hot already and he enjoyed feeling the grass under his bare feet and the sunrays warming his pale skin. He really should go in and call the woman with dyed hair and the muscle man to tell them where Lauritz was, but he didn’t feel like moving. It was so long since he had sat in the sun, and he defended his laziness by working up some indignation over their irresponsibility and the recklessness Andreas had shown in leaving his son with such superficial friends. He was sure he had told them when he would bring the boy back.
Andreas called later in the morning. He would come and fetch Lauritz. Robert was about to say something about the woman with dyed hair having forgotten their arrangement, but didn’t, amazed the other man apparently took it for granted that he had taken the boy home with him. Andreas would come at once. Where was he calling from? The house, he replied curtly. He had arrived yesterday evening on the last train, he hadn’t wanted to call so late. How considerate, thought Robert, and offered to drive. He had a car, after all.
When they turned off the main road and drove beside the meadow towards the wood they saw the horse in the same place as it had been two months earlier, on the rainy day when Robert took Lauritz and Andreas home. The sun shone on its flanks, which quivered as if from a shock when the flies pestered it. Andreas came out into the yard and squatted down with open arms as Lauritz ran towards him. They sat in the garden on a bench by the house wall. Lauritz was on a swing hanging from a big plum tree. Andreas had set a bowl of plums between them on the bench, violet blue, with a matt skin like dew. The grass had not been mown for a long time and was almost as long as the corn in the field at the end of the garden. The wind made the cobs rock from side to side in snaking tracks, and poppies glowed restlessly, scattered amidst the corn. Andreas offered him a cigarette, they smoked and ate plums. Robert tried to think of something to talk about.
How had the première in Malmö gone? Andreas squinted in the sunshine. It had come off very well, the Swedish reviewers had been quite over the moon. But that didn’t matter now. Pensively, he lowered his eyes and dug his nail into the circle of loose tobacco at the end of his cigarette, then abruptly started to talk. Robert was surprised they seemed to be on such familiar terms. On the telephone Andreas had been very short, almost formal, maybe because he thought Robert might be cross. Look at me! called Lauritz. They looked. He was standing up, his hands on the ropes, swinging high. They waved, the boy laughed.
Andreas had come back from Stockholm the previous day. He was no longer quite sure what he had been thinking on his way up there. When he had read the scenographer’s letters or written to her he had felt that here at last was someone who touched his innermost soul, more than anyone had done before. Now he didn’t know. They had arranged to meet at an outdoor café on Strandvägen. He was surprised she had asked him to meet her there and not at her home in Söder. He was given the explanation when she arrived, twenty minutes late, as beautiful as he remembered, pale, black-haired and with blue eyes. She did not live alone. It sounded complicated. For about six months she had been about to leave the man she lived with, but she had not yet brought herself to do it. They sat silently watching the glinting water and the ferries plying up and down. Neither of them could find anything to say, strangely enough after all the letters, all the confidences and tender words that had gone to his heart so deeply.
When she finally came walking towards him smiling in the sunshine it had seemed as if all his hopes were coming with her, no longer in the form of vague thoughts hard to pin down, about how his life could change and take on a new direction, but in the shape of a living body appearing to hold all possibilities in store for him, stepping lightly among the café tables. She went to his hotel with him, now he had come, after all. That was how it seemed, precisely as dispiriting and dull as that, when they lay side by side on the hotel bed afterwards. It had not been exactly passionate. He was not even sure she had had an orgasm. He called her in the evening. She was not alone, she said, it was difficult to talk properly. He called again the next day in the morning. Her husband had just gone. Were they actually married? She laughed down the telephone. No, not exactly.
She had read the new play he had sent her. She made some comments, and again he felt it was there, the special understanding between them. She had hit on things in the play no one else had understood. He said he was coming round to see her. She didn’t think that was such a good idea. He took a taxi. She seemed different when he saw her in her own surroundings, somehow more ordinary. They drank herb tea and she showed him her sketches for an exhibition she was working on. She resisted when he went to kiss her. He threw her down on a sofa, she twisted free. She couldn’t do it here, she said and asked him to leave.
Maybe there had been something hyped up, something rather too stilted about those letters, both hers and his own. They had been scaffolding for each other’s castles in the air, he said, smiling bitterly, as he sank his teeth into a plum and wiped juice off his chin with the back of his hand. Lauritz was lying in the tall grass, the swing swayed back and forth under the tree. Andreas had kept on phoning her. The more he doubted his precious and all-consuming passion, the more he persisted, until one afternoon a man’s voice answered from the apartment in Söder. He slammed down the receiver. In the morning a letter awaited him at the hotel reception. She had gone to Gotland with her husband. It was no good. She hoped he would understand.