Lucca had never been out to the headland. She wondered why they had never been there, she and Andreas. They had been able to see the sand bank and the rushes from the beach where they went to swim. Listen, she said, stopping, and now Robert too heard the airy, rhythmical whistling of wing beats. He looked up and turned round, but did not catch sight of the flock before it was far out on the horizon, where the calm water and clouded sky converged along a blurred edge of reflections.
The alarm started to beep. He had been on the point of falling asleep again. Half past five. He must have set it at the wrong time. He did not usually get up before seven. He was about to switch off the alarm when he caught sight of the packed travel bag standing in front of the wardrobe. They had planned to leave at six o’clock to catch an early ferry. He rose, put on his dressing gown and opened the curtains. It had rained all night, the trees were laden with rain. He met Lucca in the corridor. She wore her sunglasses, she never showed herself to him without them. She had heard his alarm even though Lea’s room was at the opposite end of the house. He asked if she would like the bathroom first. She made an evasive, sleepy gesture and went back along the corridor, her hand brushing the wall. She had grown used to the house by now.
She often heard sounds he had not caught. Her hearing had grown sharper as she trained herself for blindness. That was her own expression. He took night duties so he could drive her to the Institute for the Blind once or twice a week. She was a good student, and so far the only impediment was her firm refusal to have anything to do with dogs. She couldn’t stand dogs, particularly Alsatians, she would not dream of making friends with one. But she had started to learn Braille. One morning she sat in the kitchen moving her fingertips over the breadcrumbs on the table. What does it say? he asked. She smiled secretively. I’m not telling!
He went into the bathroom and took off his dressing gown. He leaned against the basin as he brushed his teeth and now and then glanced at himself in the mirror. A solid tousled man in his forties with foam round his mouth. He felt as heavy as the weather, but within the weight of his body he felt a lightness he had not noticed for a long time. It was the prospect of travelling that made him light, the thought of the endless motorways that would take them south, away. If he drove hard they could get through most of Germany before midnight, perhaps right down to the Stuttgart area.
He had scarcely been anywhere abroad since his divorce from Monica, on the contrary he had worked so hard for the past two years that he usually had some holiday due to him. Once only he had taken Lea to the Algarve. It was pretty awful, but she had seemed to enjoy herself. As a rule she went away with Monica and Jan, and he had not felt like going alone. He could not see himself trailing around some picturesque town and going to a restaurant in the evening. A solitary tourist secretly spying on the inhabitants, grateful if anyone smiled at him.
It was his idea for them to go away, and Lucca had agreed at once. He felt the trip might get something in her to loosen its grip. Something that had firmly embedded itself and made her life, during the past months, seem like a closed circle. She had been staying with him since he visited her at the orthopaedic hospital. He had surprised himself by his sudden whim, when he saw how deep her despair was, and invited her to stay with him. He had not known what to say when she asked why he made such an amazing offer. Too much room. That had been his modest reason. That he was someone who had too much room. But it was still the best explanation he could hit on.
Luckily she had not asked him again. He did not think it was because she had started to take him for granted. She behaved more like someone afraid of upsetting the temporary and precarious state of things with too many questions. She often kept to herself in Lea’s room or on the terrace, until it grew too cold to sit outdoors. When it began to get dark early he found her several times sitting out there in her coat or wrapped in a rug. Sometimes he asked her to come inside. He did not like the thought of her staying outside in the dusk so as not to impose on him. At other times he left her alone, relieved that she did not feel obliged to be sociable.
As he rinsed the toothpaste from his mouth his gaze fell on some of her things that had found their place on the bathroom shelves, bottles of perfume and skin lotion, her nail file, hairbrush, shower cap and bag of sanitary towels. There wasn’t a name for their chaste life together. You could say she was his guest. Since the accident he had gradually been drawn into her life, until he discovered he had moved far outside his medical sphere of action. The expression made him smile as he tidied away some used cotton wool sticks she had dropped on the floor beside the waste bin.
She had not seen Andreas or as much as talked to him on the phone since he came back from Paris and confirmed what she already knew. Robert was still playing the part of messenger, and several times he’d had to ask Andreas to be patient and stop ringing. Give it time, he kept saying to the grief-stricken man, but he could feel Andreas growing ever more despondent at the thought that he might have left it too late to repent and show goodwill. Robert himself had no idea what the future would bring. He defended Lucca’s decision to isolate herself from everyone except her son without wholly understanding her fierce resolution, and he did not press her to explain herself. The accident had stopped her in her course, and no one could tell how long her stupor would last. She did not even know that herself.
At times he felt like a living fortress against what she must feel was a siege. Andreas kept on insinuating himself with his eager guilt, impatient for her to relieve him by at least meeting him and hearing how fluently he could talk about his error. She made no comment when Robert passed on what he had been asked to tell her. She never asked what he knew about Andreas’s trip to Stockholm. Nor did she ask him to respond to the messages her mother and Miriam got him to deliver.
Robert had long telephone conversations with Else when she called to hear how things were going, and to ask if Lucca wouldn’t at least come to the phone. He had to smile when this woman with the cultivated voice tried out her mature charm on him in the hope that he might happen to reveal the nature of his relationship with her daughter by his tone of voice or some unconsidered word. He also spoke to Miriam and heard her baby wailing in the background. Still less could she comprehend why her friend had no use for her now that everything in her life had fallen apart. Else hinted darkly that they’d had a kind of row, but that it was of no importance now. He pretended not to know what she was talking about. Robert also concealed his knowledge from Andreas, although he sometimes almost interrupted his grief-stricken monologue when he went out to the house in the woods to fetch Lauritz or take him home again.
They would sit in the kitchen where the pictures of Lucca still hung on the notice-board. The sighted Lucca, building the house or swinging her son around or sitting at a Parisian café and smiling, her eyes surprised and yet aware. Andreas could be so full of remorse and self-pity that Robert found it hard to keep quiet. He remembered the shame he had heard in her voice and read on her face when she told him what had happened on Daniel’s houseboat. He could see and hear that her shame related not merely to Andreas, to whom she had been unfaithful, or Daniel whom she had misused. Something had been shattered that night, a week before she had driven herself into disaster, and Robert was the only one who had any inkling of it. He was relieved each time he drove home without having betrayed her confidence, even though he had seen Andreas in all his misery, sincere but also hollow.