The tense shoulders in the woollen coat dropped, and Harry’s daughter stared crestfallen. She couldn’t understand it, she had seen them coming out of his building arm in arm. She looked up. It must have been her she had seen coming out the day her mother went to hospital. She had been tall and slim and black-haired… Harry’s daughter raised her voice again and struck the table, making Lucca’s cup rattle on its saucer… Like you! At that moment Lucca caught sight of Miriam. She stood up so abruptly that the chair fell over, called the waitress, passed her the change she had in her pocket and ran to meet her bewildered friend. Behind her she heard Harry’s daughter call out in a despairing voice. Couldn’t they talk? As she took Miriam’s arm and walked on along the pavement she cursed his idea of having her hair dyed for the part in The Father. At the same time she wondered who she could be, the young black-haired woman Harry’s daughter had seen him with. Was it the strange girl he had thought of when he made the suggestion? Had she been the substitute for an unknown woman?
The telephone rang next morning while she sat in bed reading A Doll’s House, now and then looking over the harbour that appeared and disappeared again every time the wind lifted the curtains in front of the open sliding door. She decided not to answer it, afraid it was Harry’s daughter. It went on ringing and in the end she stood up. It was Andreas. She was taken by surprise at hearing his voice and said Harry was in Skagen. He knew that. He was in Copenhagen, could he come round? Five minutes later the doorbell rang. She had to smile when she saw his silhouette behind the plate glass of the elevator door. She had seen the same silhouette exactly a year before on her way down the stairs after having tea with Harry. He wore his leather jacket and smiled his boyish smile, but he didn’t seem shy.
Harry had called him a few days before, about his play, and during the conversation had told him she was in town. That was why he had come. He had to see her, and the next day he had caught the train, and here he was. She looked at him. You must be crazy, she said. He knew that. But he had thought of her a lot… it had been so strange, what happened on the rock that afternoon. Either it was nothing or… he had to see her again to find out what it was. If it was anything.
They sat on the balcony looking at the clouds over the harbour and at each other, suddenly shy. He had blurted it all out, and now he didn’t know what to say. She wondered at his initiative and courage. She hadn’t thought about him as much as he had about her, and she said what she thought straight out. She said she had not known what to make of what happened on that rock. As they sat there it felt as if she had spent the past six months in a kind of trance. She felt she was being honest as she said that.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. There was quite a strong wind and he could not get his cigarette to light however much he turned this way and that. She suggested they go inside. She went first, and in the middle of the room she turned to face him. It was as if they’d been forced to get up from those chairs out on the balcony. He looked at her expectantly, the man who had come by train all the way from Rome merely because he had been thinking of her and knew she was alone.
It surprised her that she did not feel any guilt towards Harry, and how easy she felt it was to talk to him when he called. She thought the ease was a sign in itself. She felt as if all the muscles in her body had relaxed after a tension that had gone on so long she had confused it with rest. She felt untroubled with Andreas. They did things she would never have done with Harry. One morning they went to Tivoli even though it rained, and rode on the Ferris wheel in the wet, grinning like children. One day they took the hydrofoil over to the island of Hven and hired bicycles. They lay kissing on a grassy slope, from where you could see the towers and power station smoke-stacks of Copenhagen in the distance. The same view she had seen a year before from the bathing jetty, on her last day with Otto. That day seemed as far away now as the city skyline seen from Hven.
Andreas went back to Rome a week later. She asked him to go. She had to be alone, she said, to be able to think. He gave her his telephone number. If she felt like calling him when she had done her thinking. That same day she packed her things and took a taxi to the villa in Frederiksberg. As she drove through town it occurred to her that her things took up no more room than they had done when she left Otto’s apartment the year before. Two suitcases, some zip bags, some plastic bags. She had tried to call Harry, but he did not answer that afternoon. It was a relief. Instead she sent him a letter. Not a long one. He did not reply, and she never heard from him again.
Years later she asked herself if he had wanted it that way. Perhaps he had foreseen it was possible when he invited Andreas to come and visit them in Spain. She pondered on whether he had unconsciously wanted to hasten the inevitable, because he could not make the break abruptly himself. But it was only a thought. She had felt heavy inside when she heard the letter land in the letterbox with a dull thud, but it also made her more sure of her intentions, and she sensed that at last she was taking her life into her own hands. He wasn’t her only sacrifice. She had left the script of A Doll’s House on his desk.
She spent a week at home in the villa without anyone knowing she was there. She was just as alone as she had been the summer before when Otto threw her out and Harry called to invite her for tea. Just as alone, she thought, as when she was on her own in the evenings listening to Else speak to all and sundry over the air while she looked through the black and white pictures of young Giorgio in a square in Lucca, in front of a church wall speckled with the fleeting shadows of swallows. She talked to no one, nor did she give way to her need to hear Andreas’s voice again. She was quite proud of that when she did finally call to tell him when her plane would land in Rome.
25
He had not shaved for several days, and her scarf caught in his long stubble when they embraced. You’ve still got this, have you? he mumbled, smiling pensively and touching the soft petrol-blue silk. It had been the first present he gave her, shortly after she arrived in Rome, one afternoon as they were walking up the Via Condotti. The stubble scratched her face and made her feel she was waking up. She had been going around like a sleepwalker, alone in the house when Lauritz was at nursery school, left to all the needless worries she had been embroidering because she had nothing better to do. They faded and vanished like the images of a meaningless dream when Andreas picked up her suitcase and they left the airport building to find a taxi. She repeated the funny things Lauritz had said and described how she had repaired the hole in the wall around the stove pipe and arranged the books in alphabetical order. So now Harold Pinter had his place beside Pinocchio! As she gradually ran out of things to report on they contented themselves with exchanging kisses on the back seat of the taxi, a little shy as they usually were when they had been away from each other and were picking up the threads again.
She nestled into his arms and breathed in the scent of his leather jacket as his hand slid up her thigh under the short skirt. He caressed the bare skin between the top of the stocking and her suspender belt. Only the taxi driver’s ironic gaze in the back mirror stopped them throwing themselves at each other. She could see her forehead and her dishevelled auburn hair falling over his leather sleeve beside the driver’s dark African eyes. Beneath the motorway, in an anonymous district of neglected housing blocks, she saw a half-demolished house and a crane with a lead ball swinging against a building where the front wall had been cut away. The multi-coloured squares of wallpaper and paint on the smashed storeys were all that remained of one-time apartments. A second later the wall was pulverised in a grey cascade of dust and broken bricks.