The house is actually empty, and naked light-bulbs hang from the ceiling. Peggy remarks casually that she has sold her house, the removers have been that very morning, and she is leaving the next day for Vienna. Magnus alternates between amazement and anger at Peggy’s mania for not saying anything and then suddenly presenting a fait accompli reaches an infuriating level, but he betrays neither his surprise nor his annoyance. After all, he says to himself, it is better like this: that she should go, that this secretive woman with her bizarre quirks should disappear as suddenly as she had turned up again. Yes, that she should disappear from his life before he became too fond of her presence, before he allowed himself to fall into the trap of disappointed love. He observes her with forced coldness. Certainly, she looks pretty in her floaty dress the colour of a starry dawn, with a halo of red curls round her forehead, her bright green eyes and child-like smile, but he keeps these charms at a distance, as if admiring a lovely statue behind a glass case in a museum, on his way past it.
In the unfurnished living room she has improvised a table by placing a plank of wood on some trestles and set two garden chairs facing each other. She has covered the plank not with a paper tablecloth but a large magnificently woven damask cloth in silky shades of white and yellow. The plates are paper plates, but the glasses are crystal. She has bought some excellent wines, and offers him black olives and cashew nuts served in plastic containers while they await the delivery of a takeaway meal ordered from an Indian restaurant. He has never seen her so relaxed and gaily talkative, except in the old days at the Schmalkers’ house, and it is as though time has shifted, as if the clock has turned back, and he has before him the delightful flighty young girl from whom he stole a kiss. But this evening he has no desire to kiss her, but rather to slap her. And besides, this fraudulent young girl is absurdly chattering on in German, and this irritates him. Everything irritates him, himself first and foremost for taking part in this farce he is at a loss to understand and in which ultimately he is not in the least bit interested.
The meal is delivered and Peggy hastens to serve the dishes while the food is still hot. Magnus eats without appetite and drinks without pleasure, though the wines are superb. He grows increasingly bad-tempered as his hostess, animated by the wine that she takes with little sips of enjoyment, becomes more and more radiant. And suddenly unable to contain his annoyance, he says in English, ‘I’m bored.’
Then driven by a cold rage whose intensity he would be unable to explain, he goes on, still speaking in English: ‘Yes, I’m bored with you. I’m disappointed in you. I taught you my language, even though I’m averse to speaking it, but what have you taught me? Nothing. For nearly five months we’ve seen each other twice a week, sometimes more, but never have you told me anything about yourself, or been bothered about me. Just who are you bothered about? No one but yourself. We were neighbours, so why pretend you were living on the other side of town? It’s a small detail, but why always be evasive and misleading, conceal things, lie? For you lie, you like to lie, to invent secrets, to fabricate a bogus mysteriousness. It’s childish and tedious.’
Peggy listens. She is no longer smiling. Her face has lost the flush and radiance the wine had given it. Even her lips are white.
He sees her sitting there in front of him, very stiff, as though nailed to her chair, with a chalky complexion, her hands clenched on the tablecloth. Far from being moved by the violent distress he has produced in her, he continues his indictment.
‘And let me tell you, you’re not honouring the memory of your husband by refusing to mention him, never uttering his name, not even here, this evening, in this house that was also his, where you lived together, and which you’ve just sold off like some unwanted piece of old furniture.’
He hears the quickened breathing of the young woman, paler than her dress the colour of a sad dawn that hangs loose on her paralysed body, and he hears his own voice whose inflections and quality are bizarrely unrecognizable to him, and he does not know where the harsh words he utters in this aggressive tone come from. ‘I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you, and I never will …’ With calm cruelty a voice that is not his own delivers words full of hostility, bitterness. Words that are no longer his, have nothing to do with him, appal him. But they issue from him, like the moans or confused words that issue from a sleeping man. ‘There’s nothing about you that I love, neither your voice, your body, your skin, nor your smell. Everything about you is repellant to me …’
Then a curious transfer or, rather, displacement occurs: Peggy slowly gets to her feet and takes over the acrimonious monologue in a subdued whispering voice: ‘Everything about you is repellant and unbearable to me. I wish you’d disappear. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wish I’d never met you. Never.’
With these words she falls silent, standing behind her chair, her hands resting on the back of it. She stands there very erect, with a fixed stony gaze, lost in a vision that envelops her in a bluish light — the scene brought to life by the declaration of non-love their two crazed voices delivered a moment ago is suffused with the same light as on the day it actually took place, out on the cliff-tops.
On the towering chalk cliffs overlooking the English Channel, white rock and grey waters with reflections of steel blue, purple and silvery green, up there, where the view is so extensive, where you can breath a sense of unlimited space. Some evenings, when the weather is clear, you can see France on the other side of the Channel. Up there, where the wind blows free, carrying sea, sky and forest smells, gulls nest on the crags, black-headed sheep graze level with the sky.
Up there, a couple went walking one spring morning. It is this couple that Peggy can see, that she watches, unblinking, so intensely that Magnus too can see the scene in that steady gaze.
And the past invites itself into the dining room, and takes its place at the table between the two who are dining together.
Two figures walk with slow measured steps. They seem to glide through the grass rippling in the wind. Sometimes one of them stops, and the other turns to face the one who has stopped, then the couple resume their progress.
A man and a woman, they walk side by side but do not take each other’s arm or hold hands. They brush shoulders, and yet there is a sense of insuperable distance between them. Their mere presence on the cliff-top is enough to harden the morning light, erode the peacefulness of the place, circumscribe the immensity of space and reduce it to a stage set.
They have reached the edge of the cliff. They face each other, less than a metre apart. The sun is still weak, the sky a milky blue, the sea a pinkish grey, darkening on the horizon. The woman speaks without raising her voice, but the wind that steals everything — pollen, dust, sand and leaves, smells and sounds — snatches her words and carries them off in its invisible folds to sow them in another place, at another time.
Standing there stiffly, with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her raincoat, the woman says, ‘I’m bored with you, bored to death. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you and never will. There is nothing about you that I love, neither your voice, your body, your skin, nor your smell. Everything about you is repellant and unbearable to me. I wish you’d disappear. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wish I’d never met you. Never.’