Now and then she looked after Lea. Then she made her all the fatty and unhealthy dishes with thick gravy which Lea loved and Monica and Robert refused to make, and afterwards she read aloud to her from Huckleberry Finn, always that and nothing else. When Robert came alone she asked him worriedly how things were. He was not just her only child, he was also her only contact with the outside world, and for over forty years he had been the one who imparted deepest meaning to her life.
Her ceaseless questioning made him impatient and irritable and as a rule he snapped out brief answers, at the same time feeling guilty at being so grudging. But at other times she did not ask questions when he came, on the contrary she seemed distracted, as if he disturbed her reading. Not until he was on his way down the staircase with its terrazzo flooring and marble-patterned walls did it occur to him that she might only question him out of politeness and old habit. As someone trying to hide the fact that in reality she had lost interest in the noise and bother of daily life in order to devote herself to her daydreams at long last.
On Lea’s twelfth birthday he was waiting in front of her school when she came out. She was surprised, it had not been arranged, he had gone into town on a sudden impulse. She stood there surrounded by her friends, who glanced at him shyly. She herself felt self-conscious. Her friends were going home with her, Monica was expecting them. He had bought her a pair of roller skates, and she tried them out at once there on the pavement, chiefly to please him, it seemed. He stood and waved as she went off to the bus stop with her friends, even though he was going the same way. He didn’t want to embarrass them more than was strictly necessary, so he waited until their bus had left and took the next one. Twelve years. At that time they had really believed it was possible, he and Monica. They had both been tired of mucking around. They had more or less tried what there was to try, they thought. When she found herself pregnant they had already known each other a long time. They had jumped into it with their eyes open.
That was how they had put it to each other. Eyes open. But it was already hard to recall what he had thought then. Monica had become a stranger again. She was friendly, there was no longer anything to quarrel about, and her new husband was equally friendly. That was how it could turn out. As simply as that. She had stopped loving him and started to love someone else, and Robert had long ago stopped pondering over whether the one thing was the cause of the other or vice versa.
If he sometimes thought to himself that love was like music, it was not because he was feeling poetic. But love was just as invisible and hard to understand, perhaps because there was nothing to understand. An impersonal, transforming force, which found the way by itself according to its own interior laws, uncaring of who and what it pulled with it or left behind in its calm or restless flow. Music cared just as little about who played, the notes could not help it if they were played beautifully or clumsily, on finely tuned instruments or a miserable broken-down honky-tonk in which half the strings were missing.
He did not think in this vein every day. There was no one he could confide such thoughts to. When he was alone he could almost fall into a kind of trance, in which the thoughts landed and took off as randomly as the irresolute sparrows on the terrace. In the evening he read his professional journals, when he was not too tired. There was always a pile of them he had not got through. He merely riffled through the newspaper, and when he let it fall on the floor he had already forgotten the details of what he had read.
The only person outside the hospital he talked to regularly was Jacob, a young colleague who lived with his wife and their two small children in a house matching his own not far away. They played tennis once or twice a week, and sometimes Jacob invited him over on a Saturday. Jacob was very popular on account of his frank, uncomplicated manner. He was one of the doctors the young nurses flirted with, boyish in appearance, well-trained, with hair like yellow corn. Robert could feel Jacob looked up to him because he was older and came from a big hospital in Copenhagen, and this status compensated for the irritation at his heavier body and poor condition when Jacob beat him on the tennis court yet again.
Jacob’s wife was dark-haired and had brown eyes, she was always well turned out in a relaxed way. She had an excellent figure, but there was something far too practical about her impeccable appearance which prevented Robert finding her attractive. Maybe that was why she did not like him, perhaps because as a divorced, single man he was a constant reminder of all the dangers threatening their domestic idyll. But it might also be that she had detected Robert’s suppressed distaste for sitting in their garden chatting about everything and nothing, while the children rushed around and clambered all over their father. Or was it quite simply because he smoked? As a rule she asked him to stay and eat with them, and Robert did his best to seem house-trained, remembered to pick his stubs off the lawn and tried to keep up the flow of talk with her when Jacob in his apron was grilling steaks.
Jacob treated him as a friend, and the slight twinges of conscience Robert felt over his trusting openness made him behave as if they really were close friends. When Jacob confided in him, he responded with some confidential story about himself as an example for recognition, letting the younger man mirror himself in his experiences and see in them what he found useful to see. He had gradually developed a sincere liking for Jacob, although he never quite got over the feeling that Jacob’s apparently uncomplicated and hygienic happiness was something separate from his own life. The games of tennis and the Saturdays in their garden became part of his routine, and neither Jacob nor his wife seemed surprised that he never worked up the energy to ask them back.
When Jacob once asked, Robert told him about his divorce and how he had discovered Monica was being unfaithful to him. It was a summer evening the previous year. They were in the garden, the children had been put to bed and Jacob’s wife lay on the sofa in the living room watching television. Jacob listened with a solemn expression quite unsuitable to his boyish face. He was obviously showing his sympathy and respect for the confidence his discreet friend was placing in him, but Robert felt he could detect a touch of inquisitive curiosity in the other’s attentive gaze. As he told his story he observed Jacob sitting under the garden umbrella in his trainers, his Bermuda shorts and the T-shirt from a Greek holiday island, as the glow from the barbecue died out. In the twilight, voices sounded from the gardens around them, and behind the hedges you could see the fleeting shadows of neighbours as they passed in and out through the lit terrace doorways.
While telling the story he felt it sounded like an episode from a Brazilian soap opera. He had been to a conference in Oslo, but when the last lecture was cancelled because of illness he decided to go home half a day earlier than planned. He did not know what to do with himself in Oslo on a raw Sunday in January. He called home from the hotel early in the morning before going to the airport. The answering machine was on. He asked himself later why he had not given a message instead of ringing off when he heard his own voice and the following long tone. When he let himself into the flat a few hours later Monica came out of the bedroom. She was naked, which surprised him, she always wore a nightgown in bed.
He asked where Lea was. She was staying over with a friend. He was going to go and kiss her but stopped when she looked at him with a stiff, almost hostile expression. It would be best if he went out again, just for fifteen minutes. At this stage of the story Robert made a point of describing in detail how he had stood in his own home in his overcoat, with snow in his hair, as his naked wife asked him to take a walk round the block, but Jacob held his serious expression. Monica remained standing there, fixing him with her unfamiliar gaze, and although it had begun to dawn on him that he had arrived at an inopportune moment, nevertheless he asked, almost as if to provoke her, why it was essential for him to go. For his own sake, she replied, and at that moment he heard through the door of the bedroom, which was slightly ajar, the jingling sound of a belt buckle.