They had both laughed out loud. Betsy had stuck out a knee and filched a cigarette from the glass on the table.
13. Let’s Crawl Under the Covers
When she was finished at the hairdresser, Armanda took care of a couple of errands, then went home. Surgery hours were still in progress on the first floor, her father’s patients came and went, but upstairs she bumped into no one. So I’ll just pop over to number 36, she thought with the feeling of happy relief that she had come to associate with this idea. She liked going to Lidy’s house. She really loved to keep it running in apple pie order.
When she got there, there were a couple of letters lying on the mat. As she picked them up and checked to whom they were addressed and who had sent them, her raincoat dragged on the floor. “Mrs. L. Blaauw,” she murmured on the stairs, realized it sounded strange, got a lump in her throat, and went, as soon as she got upstairs, to the garbage can that lived in a deep cupboard next to the kitchen. A short time later the unopened mailing from the perfumery to its customers was buried under the chrysanthemums that had been there all week. She also emptied the ashtrays.
The light was already fading as she looked around the living room. No need to dust today. So I’ll iron a couple of shirts. A few minutes later she was doing this, one flight up. The ironing board had its allotted place in the hall, with a lamp above it, and she spread out the ironed shirts on the bed in the master bedroom next door.
Inhaling the smell of steam and almost singed cotton that Lidy always said made her feel faint, she was just getting a dress iron out of the cupboard when she heard the front door close downstairs. She jumped, and looked at the time. He’s early today, she thought, and then did something that just came over her. She hurried to the dressing table set at an angle in the corner, ran a brush through her hair, and pulled her sweater nice and tight over her breasts. Then she switched off the overhead light, and lit a floor lamp, cast a glance at the curtains but decided to leave them open so that Sjoerd, whom she could already hear on the third tread of the stair, would find her bathed in ocher light, very much to her advantage, with a mysterious reflection in the window behind her.
He stood in the doorway. Pausing for a moment to take in the situation, he came over to her with the same decisiveness, she realized in a flash, with which he must have stopped work half an hour before. And they started to kiss, immediately, greedily. Moving one arm behind her back, he had already succeeded in closing the curtains.
It was not their first embrace, far from it. For more than a year now, Armanda had been going around the house at the oddest hours for a woman. And Sjoerd had quite often reached out in the dark hallways or by the stove in the kitchen to pull her close. But contrary to what might be assumed, the more time went on, the more she began to be coy, pushing him away from her when he pressed her against a wall, his desire for her declaring itself openly as he went hard against her stomach. One time she had interrupted their playful wrestling and said, “I won’t do it till I’ve seen my sister’s dead body.”
Did those words come out of my mouth? she had thought immediately, and was relieved when he reacted so casually, even quite heartlessly.
“Anyone who still surfaces these days is put straight into a closed coffin. You’ll never get to see it now.”
So today it looked as if Armanda had pushed her reservations aside. When Sjoerd said, “Be my wife,” whispering, as if someone could hear him, she found it wonderful that his fingers, which never had a problem anyway, had already located the hooks on her bra.
Armanda returned his embrace, pulled her sweater over her head, let him undo the zipper on her skirt, climbed out of it eagerly, and searched at once for his warm mouth again. Then she simply couldn’t find anything amiss in her behavior, as she fell back with him onto the bed covered in carefully ironed shirts, first she was on top, then he was. In that moment Armanda was already far away in her head. The only signal her thoughts gave off was in a certain look, yearning, utterly honest, that a man would recognize as declaring that she was his love, and yes, she was willing.
Then, at a moment that was totally inconvenient, erotically speaking, Armanda, who was still a virgin — this requires saying, because these things are relevant — started a conversation. And its opening theme was the undeniable fact that legally speaking, Lidy was still alive.
“Ridiculous,” said Sjoerd in the same tone of voice he had just used to whisper something sweet in her ear. “You know as well as I do.”
“Maybe,” she said, and told him right to his stunned face that in this moment she could feel not only her sister’s ghostly eyes on her but, to tell him the truth, his as well. Together they were watching to see if she did everything the right, well-tested way. “Am I right, or not?”
“No.”
“And while I remember it, why did you just say ‘be my wife’ and not, for example, ‘be my love’ or, just as good, ‘let’s crawl under the covers’?”
He began to laugh. Before she knew what was happening to her, he slid out of bed, switched off the lamp, and took her in his arms again in the pitch darkness.
“Nobody can watch you now,” he said in the same sweet whisper, but then his voice changed. As if he found himself in a discussion with her at a point where only the most powerful arguments could hope to prevail, Sjoerd told Armanda how much he loved her and how beautiful she was. Not a night went by, he said, in which he didn’t spend time thinking about her — and she should know that thinking meant more than just thinking — as he saw her face and her perfect round mouth and emerald green eyes always in front of him, no different from now, along with her long dark brown hair, and the most magnificent naked breasts that a lonely man could imagine, and if it came to that, would be able to recognize at once and prefer to a thousand other pairs of breasts!
At this point his voice sank again, as Armanda buried him in kisses. And everything would have run its normal course if the front doorbell had not rung at that very moment.
Armanda flinched, horrified.
“There’s someone at the door. Someone wants to come in!”
“No, no,” murmured Sjoerd, who actually hadn’t heard a thing, since the sound of the doorbell sometimes didn’t reach this high up in the house.
But it was true. In number 77 the table had been laid ready for some time now. Grandpa Brouwer and Nadja had taken a little walk and come to fetch the two lovebirds home to supper.
The bell rang again softly.
Up on the fourth floor the bedroom was already bathed in lamplight. With Sjoerd’s cold, tired eyes looking at her from the bed, Armanda was slipping hastily into her clothes.
14. In the Village
This is what they call sleep….
As she stumped through the puddles of an anonymous street in an anonymous village at half past three in the morning, she was alone with the storm for the first time. To left and right were low houses, and not a light to be seen anywhere. Simon Cau had dispatched her and the two daughters of the tavernkeeper to different parts of the village to drum the inhabitants awake.