‘I don’t know,’ and Kroner twisted his glass of whisky on its base, ‘it’s just that I keep thinking about you.’
Dance with him.
‘I could be married,’ I said, ‘for all you know.’
‘You’re not married. I asked.’
‘I’m twenty-six years old. If I’m not married yet, there must be something wrong with me.’
‘Not that I can see.’
Exasperated now, I said, ‘I’ve got a child.’
‘I know,’ and Kroner grinned, ‘but he isn’t yours, is he?’
‘I love him like he’s mine.’
Kroner’s eyes moved across my face, first one way, then the other, not stopping anywhere, just sliding over it. Afterwards he looked into his drink again.
‘Then I’ll love him, too,’ he said in a quiet voice, and nodded to himself. ‘I’ll love him, too.’
Two months later I was wearing a pale-yellow dress down to the floor and he was wearing a dark-blue suit, and there was confetti on his shoulders and in his hair — tiny pale-blue horseshoes, tiny silver bells. His father’s sweet red wine flowed all afternoon and on into the evening. Dr Holbek recited a poem in our honour. He called it ‘A Connubial Epiphany’. We hardly knew what the title meant, let alone the poem, but we both applauded loudly at the end. There was a five-piece band, and we were in each other’s arms. Round and round we went, until my heels blistered.
‘There,’ I said to Axel, who was watching from a castle on the far side of the world. ‘I’m dancing with him. Are you satisfied?’
I never wanted Peter Kroner’s children — that wasn’t the point of the marriage — but he took one from me anyway (if you can have a man put his seed in you and call it taking; I think you can). It was a baby girl and, just after she was born, he came into the bedroom with an armful of pink roses. There were twenty-six of them, and they’d travelled all the way from the city, he said, by special courier.
‘I’m so proud of you.’ His grazed face blurred and I felt his lips on my cheek.
As far as I was concerned, it was like a robber going back to the bank he’d stolen from and congratulating it. I didn’t say anything, though. I couldn’t. The smell of the roses sickened me, their heavy sweetness thickening the air. I had to ask the midwife to stand them by the open window. Kroner didn’t notice. He was holding his baby daughter in both hands and his face had softened like a saint’s.
‘Black hair,’ he said, ‘just like her dad.’
I had given birth at my father’s house, which was where we were living then. Kroner wasn’t happy about it — his parents’ house was bigger — but I’d insisted, not so much for my own sake as for Mazey’s. I didn’t want him to be uprooted from the only place he knew.
It was a hot summer. Every day Kroner would drive over to the quarry, and I would stay in the house and sit by the window and think of the stream all dried up at the bottom of the field and the willow’s branches trailing in the mud. In my head everything was numb. I didn’t feel much for the child. When it lay in my arms and I looked down at its raw, puckered skin, it wasn’t love I felt, or even fondness. I’d loved once and I wasn’t about to be tricked into loving again — especially not by a pink, twitching thing with someone else’s hair. And besides, after loving Axel and then Mazey, there didn’t seem to be anything left over. It was so different from Mazey, too. I remembered how envious Eva had been, and now I understood. This new child cried all the time. There was so much strength in its tiny, swollen body. I heard the crying not with my ears, but my nerves; I felt like wood under a blunt saw, splintering. I’d find myself staring into her mouth, the hard curve of her tongue, dark-red, it was, almost purple-black at times, and then I’d want to hurt her.
I couldn’t get over the feeling that I’d been robbed, somehow, or cheated. Partly it was Kroner himself: the joy he took in the child, the holy face he had when he looked down at her, the lightness in his step — I was sickened by it just as I’d been sickened by the flowers. There were days when he seemed to be looking at me with a kind of crafty pleasure, as if he’d slipped something past me. He’d married me. I’d had his child. He’d got his own way all along, and I was too exhausted to do anything about it.
I was just settling into my chair on the back porch one morning when I heard the sound of an engine in low gear. I couldn’t think who might be visiting — I didn’t have many friends — and though I didn’t feel like company, I was curious to see whose car appeared in the clearing. It was Karl’s, but Eva was driving and she was alone. I watched her open the door. She was wearing a loose blue dress and a pair of bedroom slippers. As she turned towards the house, I saw the bruising on her cheek and around her eye, and then I knew why she had come.
We sat on the porch all morning drinking sweet black coffee. I smoked one of her cigarettes, my first for more than a year, which made the world glass over. She noticed the cushions I’d arranged beneath me.
‘Does it still hurt?’
I nodded.
‘After I had Thomas,’ she said, ‘they sewed me up too tight. They had to cut me open again.’
‘Eva.’
‘Sorry.’ She threw her cigarette into the yard.
She told me Karl had started drinking in the mornings. He had a few before he went out, and by the time he came home at night he was so loud the roof seemed to jump right off the house. The children were frightened. Even the guests were frightened. She tried to smile, but it hurt. I watched her carefully. Her left eye looked like the letter e if you typed it on the hotel typewriter and then went back and typed another e on top of it. She was still talking about Karl. She wondered if I could speak to him. He was my brother, after all. She couldn’t think who else to ask.
I didn’t think it was right of Karl, hitting her like that, but at the same time, knowing him as I did, I could see how she might have driven him to it. Her hair was dry and split, and her skin was turning spongy. There was a slackness about her, a lack of energy, that I knew would infuriate him. He would want to take hold of her and shake her. Wring her out.
‘There’s no point me talking to him,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘He doesn’t listen to me. He never has.’
Sighing, Eva lit another cigarette. She looked greedy when she smoked; it was the way her lips reached out for the filter, as if they couldn’t wait to draw the smoke from it.
‘What about your husband?’ she said.
That evening I spoke to Kroner. He knew Karl through his father and the wine business. I persuaded him to have a drink with Karl, though I told him I didn’t think it would do much good.
‘Just try,’ I said. ‘For Eva’s sake.’
Three nights later the door burst open and Kroner stood in the middle of the room, his face more grazed than usual, his clothes dishevelled. He was shouting.
‘He broke my tooth. He broke my fucking tooth.’
The baby started crying.
Kroner touched one hand against his mouth, then took it away and looked at it. ‘Your family,’ he shouted. ‘Your fucking family —’
‘My father’s in the next room —’
‘You, your brother, your crazy fucking child …’ He was circling the room, first one way, then the other. He kept touching his mouth and looking at his hand. There wasn’t much to see. ‘I don’t know why I got into this. I don’t have the first idea …’
I looked at the baby’s hard, curved tongue. I thought of feeding her, but her blunt gums hurt my breasts.
‘I don’t — I just don’t have the first fucking idea —’
‘Nor do I,’ I said in a quiet voice.
He heard me, though, and suddenly his hands flew up into the air and his face creased above his eyebrows, through his chin. ‘Don’t say that, Edith.’