“Lovely!”
The little group was standing next to the sideboard, where every imaginable kind of food was already set out. Armanda leaned to the side, took a little toast square with smoked salmon on it, the sort of thing that you can pop into your mouth whole in a perfectly genteel way, and noticed, as she was chewing it, that the others were still looking at her expectantly. She swallowed hastily.
“Lidy’s in Zeeland,” she said, out of breath.
“Why on earth?” asked Betsy.
“Oh … I think she wanted to get into the car and just go. Yes, she wanted to be behind the wheel again. You lose the knack so quickly, don’t you?”
She saw someone in the group nod.
“Actually I had something to do with it,” she went on. “I have a goddaughter out there, you didn’t know that, did you? A little treasure, today’s her seventh birthday, she set her heart on getting a pair of ballet shoes from her godmother.”
Betsy smiled as she eyed her, but she also raised an eyebrow. Meanwhile someone had turned up the volume on the music, a slow clarinet solo. Armanda raised her voice accordingly, but also because this time she’d be able to give the right answer to the question.
“But when we were talking on the phone, Lidy and I, at the beginning of the week and the subject of this little trip to Zeeland came up, she was immediately all fired up about it. Wouldn’t you really rather go to Betsy’s party, my beloved sister asked all casually, but I know her. First I just let her ask about how far it was, and the state of the roads, and the possibility of doing most of this magical journey on a boat, and then finally I gave way. Okay, fine, I said, then why don’t you go in my place.”
This was what Armanda said, and then looked past the others into the room in a slightly confused way, watching a few of the guests already slow-dancing a barely recognizable fox-trot to the lone clarinet; when she brought her gaze back to the group around her, she realized Sjoerd was watching her closely, with a rather ambiguous look. She looked right back at him, and immediately caught herself remembering the one time he had kissed her on the mouth, in black and white, a movie still. She quickly registered that his expression was softening.
I’m a little dizzy, she said to herself, but it feels good. Everything around me looks a bit blurred, it must be the cigarette smoke, all those blue rings and snaky white garlands going up to the ceiling in the heat of the candle flames. Besides which I feel hot. Is this life?
She had openly given him a very loving look.
The slow fox-trot was suddenly broken off with a scratching noise — someone had decided it was too early to set that mood — not to sound out again, even more mistily, until hours later, when everyone, as if at the wave of a wand, was ready to listen as the clarinet wove its tale of desire, consent, and the tenuous boundary that divides them. Armanda and Sjoerd sought each other out without hesitation and pressed themselves together. After spending the entire evening in such close proximity, it felt right to them, and everyone else, to dance cheek to cheek. Outside all was stormy night, and neither of them cared what anyone might think who saw that here, under the wood-beamed ceiling, a man was cradling the sister of his wife in his arms, his mouth pressed to her ear. The mood that held them both captive was unmistakable.
She descended the stairs behind him. He had called for a taxi, and as the stand was close by, they were already on their way downstairs. The front door was stuck. He reached past her in the hall and used force. Rain immediately stung her face. The taxi didn’t come. She kept taking quick peeks out from behind the half-closed door at the dark street and at a gaggle of dripping cyclists leaning against a lamppost. Apart from that, absolutely nothing was going on.
Ten minutes later, as they were running down the little side street, she was still holding his hand and they both laughed at the whole show. At the dam there wasn’t a taxi to be seen. They crossed the road fast and stood in the doorway of a clothing store, though it faced north and provided little protection. She was absolutely freezing, shivered as she raised her collar, but held herself a little apart from Sjoerd. As she peered across the square, she could barely recall the happy atmosphere at the party, full of promises of the sort that don’t necessarily raise expectations that they’re going to become reality.
“Here comes one,” she called, and ran with her shawl over her soaking wet hair, hanging down in rats’ tails.
The taxi driver, like all taxi drivers in this city, was a talker. Huddled close together again in the soft backseat of the car, Armanda and Sjoerd had to put up with being told that the situation of the traffic this evening was extremely precarious. At the Keizersgracht an uprooted tree had blocked the road from Raadhuisstraat all the way to Berenstraat; in Bos en Lommer the balcony of one of the apartment houses still under construction had been ripped off and came crashing down on the streetcar rails; and in the square in front of the main train station, the taxi driver said, keeping up a steady speed automatically, he had had to swerve to avoid a 200-foot crane that was swaying toward the water at the edge of the open harbor while firemen raced to and fro.
“Dangerous weather,” said the taxi driver expectantly, turning round to them for a long moment. As he kept them under observation in the rearview mirror, he told them all about a deadly accident on the Kattenburg earlier in the evening and was about to report on a traffic jam on the Wallen when he hit the brakes and went into a skid. The engine died, the driver snarled a curse, restarted it at once, and drove, craning his neck in curiosity, slowly past a crumpled motorbike with a sidecar lying in the middle of the pitch-dark Vijzelstraat.
“A Zündapp,” he said. “Beautiful machine.” And, as he shifted back into top gear, he went straight into his report about the state of traffic on the Wal, where the usual mob of drunks was letting vehicles pull up right in front of the doors of the bars, because they didn’t want to take a single step outdoors with all the roof tiles flying around loose in the narrow streets.
“Typical drunk’s thinking,” said the taxi driver. “They totter smack into a canal without their brains sending out the slightest warning, but they have a real respect for roof tiles.”
Chunks of wood, shards of glass, bits of bicycles, branches, newspapers, umbrellas, cardboard boxes, everything lying in the rain, which had meantime slackened to a gentle patter. Armanda and Sjoerd, stunned, looked out over the front seat at the city, glistening in the headlights. The well-known bridges. A little circuitous path along the river. And there was De Pijp with its precise grid of streets. As they got out at the corner of the park, Armanda felt the street plan of her home city coil around her, life-threateningly, darkly, wetly, capturing numbers 77 and 36 in its grasp, the one on the long side of the park, the other on the short.
They were standing facing each other. Armanda yawned. Through a crack in the clouds, a ray of light from the hidden full moon fell onto her storm-ravaged face.
“I’m tired.”
“So go to sleep.”
Sjoerd, his arm round her shoulder, accompanied her to number 77, where the outside light was burning. She asked if he’d like to come to breakfast tomorrow. A nod, yes, maybe, but she shouldn’t count on him. Speaking of which, what time should he pick Nadja up? She groped in her coat pocket for the key. Oh, whenever it suited him.