She looked at the note with the address and telephone number in Paris. She felt the urge to call him, just to hear his voice, but it was too early. He would not arrive until late afternoon. It was a long time since they’d had a proper talk, she felt. There was always something in the way. She had so much to do, and he was always working. Besides, for the past two weeks he had been away most of the time, in Malmö. It worried her if they grew distant from each other for a while, on friendly terms but busy and slightly conventional when they kissed good morning or goodnight. She felt he had been distant recently. In Paris it would be different, surely. She longed for Easter.
She leaned over the table and closed the window. Suddenly she was hungry and decided to make some lunch before continuing to paint. As she negotiated the piles of books again on her way through the living room her eyes fell on a bundle of old scripts. The top one was bound in red card. The title was printed on it, The Father, by August Strindberg. She picked it up and leafed through the dog-eared pages with pencilled notes half obliterated. She took the script into the kitchen and put it beside the cooker while she heated water for pasta. Indirectly, Strindberg had been the beginning of her relationship with Andreas, but of course she had not known that then. Not even when they passed each other, he in the lift on his way up, she on her way down the stairs after she’d had tea with Harry and looked out at the thunderstorm over the town.
She felt like pasta al burro with grated nutmeg, the way Giorgio had taught her to make it. It was the only thing she had learned from him, her sad clown of a father, who had merely flung out his arms as if there was no more to say as he walked backwards beside the baptistery in Florence before turning and vanishing from sight. ‘In the midst of the moonlight,’ she thought, ‘surrounded by ruins on all sides.’ She looked at the torn script and began to smile. So she did remember something. But there had been no moonlight, it had been broad daylight, and the baptistery stood just as when it had been built, dazzlingly beautiful and geometric in its green and white marble. It was only that it hadn’t gone as expected, she thought, as the steaming water in the pan began to bubble and shake.
20
The room was in total darkness. She could hear the cicadas behind the shutter of the small window. They kept the shutters closed all day to retain as much as possible of the night’s coolness. She pushed off the sheet and stretched out a hand. He was not there. The hands of the alarm clock shone green, floating in the dark. It was only just past seven. He couldn’t sleep late any more. He had told her with a wry, apologetic smile, as if it was one of the things he had lost. She summoned her energy and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The tiles were smooth and cool. She reached for the kimono hanging over a chair, and fumbled her way through the darkness with a finger brushing the rough, white-washed wall until she found the door.
Daylight fell in a sharp triangle from the doorway to the roof terrace. She climbed the stairs and stopped at the top. He had not noticed her yet. His hearing was not too good, but he did not like to admit it. She stood still. He sat cross-legged under the canopy of woven bamboo. He was reading a book, his tea cup raised in his hand as if he’d forgotten the cup and left it in mid air. The bamboo wickerwork splintered the sharp sunlight into a frayed pattern on the stone table and the tiles, and splinters of light waved over his combed-back grey hair and lined brow, his face with its crooked nose and his brown torso with folds of loose skin around the stomach and below the chest cage. He was wearing the white linen trousers she had bought him in Madrid.
She waited. He had to discover her. It had become a game she played, more with herself than with him. Coffee’s ready, he said in his hoarse voice, without looking up from his book. But he had seen her. She went and sat down opposite him. He smiled, leaning his head back to look at her through the glasses on the tip of his nose. There you are, he said. Here I am, she answered, stretching out a hand to stroke his knee. She poured herself a cup of coffee, put in plenty of sugar and sipped it as she gazed over at the range of mountains lit by the slanting sunlight, which emphasised the folds and grooves with long, blue-grey shadows among the shades of rusty red and rose.
The houses looked alike, all white-washed with flat roofs and small barred windows, like scattered sugar lumps up the mountain-side. It sounded beautiful when you described it, and when you saw the village from a distance it did resemble a picture postcard, with orange trees and olive groves and everything you could expect, but as soon as you got up there the place had a depressing air. The cement road was broken up into craters lying in wait to trip you up, the electricity cables hung in untidy garlands, and the houses were either crumbling, on the verge of collapse, or being restored, with dreary concrete walls. During the day there was never a soul about except now and then a pale weary woman in a dressing-gown behind a kitchen window. The place seemed to be inhabited by housewives and scrawny cats lying in the dust, and the only other sign of life was the smell of frying oil and the noise of television sets churning out their advert jingles from the resounding semi-darkness of the dwellings.
Harry’s house was the last one in that part of the village, it faced east and from the roof terrace there was a view over a dried up river-bed with steep sides. The river-bed was cracked in deep fissures where oleanders and carob trees had rooted, and on the other side of the river, a couple of kilometres away, another chain of mountains sloped down to the plain. Seen from the terrace, the coastline was just a diffuse transition from ochre to blue in the heat haze. They had gone down there shortly after the last night of The Father at the Royal Theatre. At the same time Harry had staged a première of Uncle Vanya in Oslo. In the weeks before they left they’d been together only when he flew down to Copenhagen for the weekend. She had been offered a role in a film, the first shots were to be taken soon, in early spring, but Harry had advised her to say no. He knew the director, and it was likely to be not just mediocre, but downright awful.
It had been raining for weeks in Denmark, Lucca thought she had almost forgotten what the sky looked like. When they got out of the plane she felt a warm breath in her face, and the almond trees were flowering in white and pink against the red earth as they drove through the dry landscape. In some places the land changed into a desert with deep crevasses and crumbling rock formations like the brains of huge, prehistoric animals. Soon they would have been there two months. They were planning to spend the summer in a house he would be renting beside the Jutland coast, before rehearsals started on A Doll’s House. She was to play Nora.