When he collected her from her room for dinner, he was struck dumb for a moment.
‘Smashing,’ he said at last, in English, after she had twirled twice on her axis in her glittering black dress, still slightly crumpled in places from the journey. Around her neck she wore a piece of Indian jewellery, and all the rings but one had vanished. When his eye settled in puzzlement on her hands, she winked an eye and grinned.
‘You didn’t like them, did you?’
‘Was it that obvious?’
‘I can read you like a book. Always could. Don’t you remember?’
He looked at his watch. ‘Time to go. Don’t forget your bag.’
On the way to the door she looked at herself again in the big, half-blind mirror on the wall and straightened a stocking. If only she would drop the damned purple, he thought. And her heels didn’t need to be quite so high, either. Just before they left the corridor, he stopped and held her back by the arm.
‘I wanted to ask you a favor. Just a small thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘Brian Millar will probably play in the lounge after dinner. At the grand piano, I mean.’ He paused and looked at the floor. ‘No one here knows that I play as well. Played. And I’d like it to stay that way. OK?’
She looked at him quizzically and shook her head very slightly.
‘But you don’t need to hide yourself! I’d like to see if this man Millar plays better than you!’
‘Please. I… I can’t really explain. But that’s how I’d like it.’
‘If you want, of course,’ she said slowly, and played absently with the strap of her bag. ‘But… there’s something up with you. I’ve been feeling it for some time. Won’t you tell me?’
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘or we’ll be the last ones in.’
At dinner Perlmann felt as if he were sitting on hot coals. He tried not to look, but his attention was focused entirely on what his daughter was saying, and he twitched at every mistake she made in English. But she did dazzlingly well. She had ended up next to Silvestri, diagonally opposite Millar.
The Italian had – and Perlmann wouldn’t have expected it of him – immediately stood up when they stepped to the table, and had straightened Kirsten’s chair for her as she sat down. At the sight of this, Ruge’s face had twisted into a grin, and Kirsten had blushed slightly under her freckles. When she dared to speak a few words of Italian, Silvestri immediately continued in his mother tongue, until she waved him to stop and he rested his hand, laughing, on her bare arm. And even though she talked mostly to Millar after that, Perlmann was quite sure that she didn’t forget Silvestri’s presence beside her for a moment.
English and history, she said, when Millar asked her what subjects she was studying. But that might change, she was still only starting. When answering Millar’s questions about the details of her study she made more linguistic mistakes than before, and Perlmann had no idea what he was eating.
But then, when the subject turned to Faulkner, and in particular to The Wild Palms, it came bubbling out of her almost faultlessly, and he wondered more than once where she got all these obscure words. Her dinner grew cold as she defended her thesis, face glowing, and Millar, who couldn’t quite remember the novel and whose argument was surprisingly weak, set down his cutlery several times and grabbed his gleaming glasses. When Kirsten was clearly about to win on points, Perlmann forced himself at least to eat the last mouthful of fillet steak, and thought of his colleague Lasker, who had stayed specifically because of his daughter.
Although he didn’t know why, he avoided looking in Evelyn Mistral’s direction. But twice he caught her eye, and both times he was confused by the mocking shyness in her green eyes. As if his daughter’s presence revealed something about him which, to her annoyance, disturbed her previous feelings.
Laura Sand, on the other hand, listened to the discussion of Faulkner in her sulky way and asked at the end what phase of his life the novel coincided with. Just once, when she thought Perlmann wasn’t watching her, her eye slipped over him and betrayed that she too was busy revising her previous image of him.
Over coffee, Silvestri offered Kirsten a Gauloise. Smiling smartly, she bent over his lighter, inhaled the smoke and instantly had a coughing fit. Silvestri’s unshaven face pulled into a grin, and he kept his next drag in his lungs for a particularly long time. Kirsten bravely wiped the water from her eyes and carefully took another drag; by now she had her coughing under control. As she added milk and sugar to her coffee, she let the cigarette with its purple stains dangle casually from the corner of her mouth. When Silvestri went on looking teasingly at her, for a moment it looked as if she were going to stick out her tongue at him.
As they left, von Levetzov held the door open for Kirsten and bowed slightly. Perlmann, who was walking behind her, had had enough of seeing his daughter in his colleagues’ force field, and really wanted to go upstairs. But now Kirsten was shaking hands with Evelyn Mistral, whose head was tilted sideways almost as much as Millar’s usually was, and then the two women walked silently towards the lounge without saying a word to one another.
While Millar was playing, Kirsten kept glancing across to Perlmann, giving him to understand, with the disparaging twitch of her lips that had for a time made Agnes furious, that she couldn’t understand why he was hiding in the face of this mediocre performance. And when Millar stood up and closed the lid over the keys, her applause was the shortest and faintest.
But he had been good, rather better than usual, and Perlmann was slightly hurt that his daughter felt the need to cheer him up with her partisan judgment.
Although few questions were being put to Kirsten now, she looked very excited, turned her head to everyone who spoke and, to Silvestri’s delight, smoked one Gauloise after another. When, in passing, someone mentioned Perlmann’s imminent invitation to Princeton, she frowned and smiled at him. She was the last to stand when the company broke up.
At the bottom of the stairs Evelyn Mistral walked towards Perlmann, who was with Kirsten.
‘Yet again, our wedding stroll comes to nothing,’ she said in Spanish, pointedly looking only at him. ‘I’m sure you have other plans.’
‘Erm… I don’t know… yes, we’ll…,’ he said, annoyed both by his stammer and by the fact that the Spanish woman, whom he felt he barely recognized at that moment, was so expressively ignoring Kirsten with her eyes.
‘You don’t need to apologize,’ she said with a face that reminded him of a schoolmistress. ‘¡Buenas noches!’
Halfway up the stairs Kirsten stopped and looked down to the hall, where Evelyn Mistral was standing with Ruge and von Levetzov. ‘Did I hear her wrong or did she call you tú? I mean, I don’t speak Spanish that well, but that’s what it sounded like to me.’
Perlmann hadn’t known it was so hard to sound casual. ‘Oh, that, yes. It’s quite customary in Spanish academic circles.’
Before she turned into her corridor, Kirsten stopped again. ‘Boda. What does that mean again?’
This time he managed a natural smile. ‘Wedding.’
The steep wrinkle that he didn’t like formed above her nose. ‘Wedding?’
‘A little joke between us.’
She kicked something imaginary from the carpet, glanced at him briefly and disappeared into the corridor.
22
When Perlmann woke from his light and troubled sleep the next morning, and looked down at the terrace, he saw Kirsten laughing at Silvestri’s trick with the swallowed cigarette. They both had cups in front of them, and on the white bistro table there were two blue packs of cigarettes that looked precisely identical. Kirsten’s tousled hair fell on her yellow sweatshirt, and now, as she brushed a strand out of her eyes, he saw the big sunglasses that covered half of her face.