She had become subservient to him. What did she think it was like, to be worshipped in that way? She had completely neglected herself for the sake of him and the boy. Lucca squeezed up her eyes. The rainwater had gathered in pools on the lawn, and the grass blades were reflected in the quiet water, black against the greyish mirror image of the sky. She breathed evenly again. Good Lord, there were enough suckers about who thought it was lovely to have a sweet, home-loving woman always ready and waiting. But Andreas was no sucker, he was an intelligent and sensitive person, and an artist too. He needed challenges, even opposition, and she had not given him any. When all was said and done he was only a man, and men tended to grow tired of women who clung to them and only yearned and sighed for confirmation. It was no surprise to find he had succumbed to temptation. Lucca looked at her. What do you want me to do then? she said. Else fell silent and looked at her for a long time, as if reading her face for an answer. Get yourself a lover, she said.
Lucca pulled up her feet and stretched out for a cushion, she clutched it to her stomach with her arms crossed over it. She looked down at the floor. The cloud cover was thinning, and pale sunlight lit the floorboards in softly outlined squares. What about you? she asked. Else smiled. What did she mean? Lucca hesitated for a moment before going on. What about the time she was with Ivan and suddenly started wearing completely different clothes and changing all the furniture? As for her friends, she had exchanged even them for Ivan’s advertising chums. Else looked past the stove into the kitchen. She had even demanded a church wedding although Ivan didn’t want that at all. She who had always held bourgeois traditions to scorn and talked of marriage as a form of prostitution. That hadn’t hindered her from parading as a fifty-year-old bride with a white veil and naughty underclothes.
Who said Ivan didn’t want a wedding? Else’s well-modulated voice suddenly sounded dry. Lucca prodded the cushion cover with a nail. He had said so himself… Else cleared her throat and looked at her. When? Lucca laid down the cushion, put her feet on the floor and crossed her legs. She swallowed and met her mother’s eyes. She explained that she had gone into the country one summer’s day not knowing Else was in town. She described how she had had dinner with Ivan and talked to him more easily than ever before, and how for the first time she had understood what Else saw in him. Until she had gone to bed, drunk with all the white wine he had poured into her, only to be woken up by his paunch rubbing her back and his stiff prick between her thighs.
She went on despite the tears that ran down Else’s cheeks. She had noticed how he looked at her in the mornings when she was on her way to the bathroom, but she had to admit she was pretty surprised to wake up with her stepfather in her bed and her stepfather’s prick between her thighs. That was why she had gone to Italy so suddenly to find Giorgio. And maybe in the end that was the reason, and not so much because he had found himself another tight delicious twenty-year-old, for Ivan finally making off. For fear of her letting the cat out of the bag some day.
Else had got up. She stood for a moment without moving, one hand resting on the cold stove pipe, before going into the bedroom. Soon afterwards she came back with her suitcase. She went into the hall to put on her coat. Lucca said there would not be a train for another hour. Else wanted to leave at once. Neither of them spoke in the car. Lucca went onto the platform with her. Maybe, she said, maybe you were asking for it. Maybe you worshipped him too much… Else turned round and slapped her soundly. Lucca staggered. Her cheek still burned as she walked to the exit. She turned in the station entrance. Her mother was sitting on a bench with legs crossed and her head leaning back. An elegant, lone female figure at a station in the provinces. Lucca could not see whether her eyes were open or closed.
A week later she stood on the opposite platform holding Lauritz by the hand and waiting for the train from Copenhagen. It was a dry day but windy and the passing clouds made shadows appear and fade again by turns. Lauritz played with the shadow of the roof as they waited. He placed himself with the tips of his toes in line with the edge where the shadow was succeeded by sunshine on the asphalt. He was equally excited each time another cloud had passed the sun and he still stood balancing like an acrobat with his toes on the boundary between light and shadow.
She still had the feeling of being cut in two. One who feared Andreas was going to leave her, and one who had started to disengage herself from the moment she had read the letter from his lover. But they no longer lived side by side, her two halves, they took turns to rule over her feelings and thoughts. She had hardly slept since getting back from Paris, and as she stood waiting for Andreas she was dizzy with exhaustion.
Lauritz did not understand why she lay in bed weeping, or why she pushed him away when he tried to comfort her. She grew irritable and reacted harshly with cross words to his persistent attempts to make contact. At other times she completely ignored him and sat for hours gazing dejectedly out at the garden and the field, torturing herself with elaborate fantasies about Andreas and the black-haired letter writer. When she was in that state everything about the boy seemed unbearable, his very existence seemed like a hindrance to her, a parasitic organism that drained her of energy and life. She came to regard him as a frightful mistake who suddenly represented everything that had made Andreas tire of her. All the routines, all the dull cud-chewing, all the washed-out and sloppy details of daily life.
But Lauritz was still more confused a few minutes later when she took him on her lap and hugged him or sat on the floor building a house with his Lego bricks, completely involved in the activity. It was not only guilt at her unexpected hatred of him that made her so attentive and devoted. She was kind to him again because she was thinking of Andreas in the past tense. She doubted that her love for him had been anything other than a craving, a self-obsessed dream. When she embraced her son she also passed into herself, into the vacuum Andreas had left when he took his love away from her and gave it to someone else. There was nothing left there, not even the shadow of love, and maybe her love had been just a shadow of his. As she buried her nose in her son’s soft neck and licked the fair down, she imagined herself another life somewhere else, alone with Lauritz. He was the only one whose love she did not need to doubt, and the only one she knew she loved more than herself.
Her thoughts about Daniel and what had happened on his houseboat went through the same fluctuations as her feelings for the boy. When she slammed the door in Lauritz’s face and lay down on her bed to weep she heard Else’s words again, inflamed with venomous female spite. Get yourself a lover! She despised herself for having yielded to Daniel’s pleading dog’s eyes. Their chance reunion had broken open the poor man’s old wound again. She had ministered to his needy loneliness merely to take revenge on Andreas and create a balance in their shared account, but that had just made her an even greater traitor. She felt she had not only betrayed Andreas but herself as well.
Daniel called one evening after she had put Lauritz to bed. Could she speak freely? It offended her to be drawn into the low-voiced mood of intimate conspiracy. She quite forgot to ask how he had got hold of her number. Did she feel very bad about what had happened? No… she just hoped he was not sorry about it himself. He was not. He still cared for her, so why should he regret it? Because… said Lucca, but did not finish the sentence. He understood. She must not think that he in any way… Now he was the one who interrupted himself. She didn’t. He gave her his mobile number, but she didn’t write it down. He hoped she would call him one day. He shouldn’t rely on that, she answered coldly.