Lucca met Otto eighteen months after she left drama school. She had heard about him and seen him at cafés and bars when out with her friends. He was already then a star in the making, an underground star if such exists. He had been interviewed in a woman’s magazine as the rumbustious puppy of young film, and if he showed up at a party you could be sure of fireworks. He had been in a relationship with a well-known rock singer and in general was the type girls kept a watch on out of the corners of their eyes over their cappuccinos and looked away from with a chilly, unapproachable air. They always referred to him in ironical terms if one of their group lost her grip and naïvely gave way to her curiosity. In their opinion he was already established although according to the usual standards he was still only promising. And Lucca thought he seemed to fancy himself a bit too much when he swaggered around in a football shirt, knitted cap and flip-flops, or whatever he hit on, scanning the bar.

When she was offered a part in a television serial in which Otto was also appearing she felt surprised at first that he could be bothered with such a job, although she naturally accepted. He had just got out of prison, she was his girl, and while he was banged up she had naturally fallen for the cop who had run him in. It was a totally fatuous script, but Otto was good and that made her better than she would otherwise have been. He was kind to her, he calmed her down with a smile or made her laugh when she was nervous, and she was surprised at his discipline. He could sit and read the newspaper or tell stories until the moment before they had to go into action and then make his entry and throw himself into his part as if with a snap of the fingers he became one with it.

In fact, he did not act. He was always himself, a fictitious edition of himself, as he would have been if chance had shaped his life along the lines of the script. He summoned the aspects demanded of the role with ease and carried everything off with his drawling diction and adroit muscular physique. They sat chatting among the lamp stands and rolls of cable in a corner of the studio while the cameramen set up their lights. Otto had never been to drama school and wasn’t planning to do so. He couldn’t be bothered to spend three years lying on the floor touching people and breathing deeply. She might well have protested, but she didn’t.

How did it start? As such things do start, as vague notions, playful fantasies, a special feeling aroused merely by sitting beside him, listening to his voice and feeling his eyes. His presence was reflected in all her words and movements, even when she turned her back on him and talked to someone else. One moment she could be really dissatisfied with herself, with her appearance, her voice and what she said, and the next she could have a sneaking feeling of not being quite what she thought she was. As if she hid a secret version of herself, so secret that she was unable to make out who she actually might be, the other woman behind her distrustful reflection.

He provoked her with his self-assurance and cool dispassion. She felt he could see through her ironic aloofness. When she tried out a sharp comment he quite simply appeared not to have heard her, unless he stared straight in her eyes so that his silence seemed a grosser insult than the most offensive reply. She admired his insolence, but kept her mask on. She waited for him to relax for a second, open up a chink.

One day when she arrived at the studio he was sitting outside in the sun studying his script. A toy-shop carrier bag lay beside him. She glanced inside it without asking leave and found a transparent box containing a red toy car. She asked him if he still played with cars. He said it was for his son. She sat down beside him, how old was his son? Six, he replied, putting down the script. He leaned his head back against the red-painted planking wall of the studio and closed his eyes. He must have been very young to be a dad. He shrugged his shoulders, she felt stupid. What was his name, then? Lester . . . that was an unusual name. He looked across the courtyard. He hadn’t seen his son since he was born. He had met the mother when he was living in the States, she had fallen pregnant by accident. They hadn’t been able to make a go of it. He said this dryly as if just describing what he had done on Sunday.

The following week Lucca and Otto were filming at night in a marina. It was the last scene they were acting together. They had a long wait before the lights were set up. He had to fall into the water during a fight in a speedboat, and he fell again and again, but she was the one who got cold, although it was the middle of July. He lent her his jacket. Later they shared a taxi into town. They spoke of the difference between making a film and acting in a theatre and about one of their older colleagues who behaved like a silent film star even when he was in close-up. He shook her hand, a bit formally, she thought, and said it had been good to work together. She agreed. Standing in the street when the taxi had gone she discovered she still had his jacket on. It was a motor cycle jacket with a zip, the sleeves were too short. That made her smile, as if it was touching. She had not even noticed she was taller than him. She put her nose under the collar and caught the scent of his strange smell.

She called him next day about the jacket. He sounded as if she had woken him up. She was sorry. She asked him to forgive her. He said she could just come round. His apartment was in a side street. She rang several times and was about to go when he finally opened the door. He wore a shabby bath robe with claret-coloured stripes like the ones old men wear for the beach. She couldn’t help smiling and he smiled back. Smart, wasn’t it? She didn’t know if he meant the bath robe or the jacket he had let her keep. Then he pulled her inside, pushed the door to and kissed her. She closed her eyes and pressed herself against him with a sudden force that surprised her, as if she had to make haste not to be paralysed by the strangeness of the situation.

*      *      *      

From the windows you looked down on a building site covered with weeds and rubble, haunted in winter by street girls and local pushers who warmed themselves at a fire in a rusty oil barrel. The flat was sparsely equipped with junk furniture which looked as if it had come from a house clearance. Some time in the Fifties it must have been in a working-class home with ambitions for higher things, and now it had been resurrected thanks to Otto’s slightly perverse but extremely chic feeling for teak and moquette. On one of the walls hung a huge, hand-drawn poster for a Sergio Leone film, and in the window a reversed neon sign in fiery red letters announced Fish is healthy. She sometimes wondered whether the junkies down on the building site brushed back their greasy fringes and raised their heavy eyes to Otto’s window. She pondered whether the message in their stoned brains seemed like a revelation or a studied insult.

The street offered a Turkish greengrocer, an Egyptian restaurant with belly dancers, a paraffin merchant, a Halal butcher and one or two massage salons. The entrance was dark and scruffy, it smelled of gas and cooking and wet dogs, and sometimes she surprised a bent figure on the stairs having a fix. She rather liked the atmosphere of kinky sex and shady dealings, the exotic scents, men with black moustaches and little knitted caps who spoke Turkish and Arabic, and women with their heads covered, wearing long coats. She had even grown used to the junkies and prostitutes. They knew her and scrounged cigarettes from her, and she had come to feel she belonged there as much as they did. But in their eyes she no doubt still seemed an upper-class git who had lost her way in town, strutting off with long steps and chin in the air.

When she wore high-heeled shoes she was almost a head taller than Otto, but he didn’t seem to mind that. If he had they would hardly have been lovers. She was a tall woman, but always wore high heels. She liked glancing at her legs, reflected in shop windows as she strode along the pavement and could still feel like a little girl playing at being a lady, hardly realising she was supposed to be grown up, although she had long ago taught herself to walk on high heels without looking awkward. As a teenager she had been clumsy, hadn’t known what to do with her long arms and legs, constantly tripping over furniture and knocking over glasses and china. She was still like a bean pole, her face was long and narrow, even her nose, and when she was in a bad mood she thought she looked like a horse. But that wasn’t the worst thing to be. Her hair was coarse and as fair as straw, with a reddish tinge, her eyes were green and her lips were full and kissable. Anyway that was what Otto said when for once he was playing the gallant.

They couldn’t have been more different. There was something compact and square about Otto. He had broad shoulders and broad hands, jaws and thighs, but his bottom was slight, and his eyes were a guileless blue which contradicted all the power he held within him. When he walked he put all his weight into each step he took. His movements were sure and precise and he always looked people straight in the eye without blinking. He had a dragon tattooed on one arm, he had been a sailor. Perhaps that was what had made him so meticulous about himself and his surroundings. He was always clean-shaven and his clothes newly laundered. He did all the housework, energetically with wide arm movements, as if it was the deck of a merchant ship he was scouring and swabbing.

When he embraced her it sometimes made her think of a drawing she had seen on a poster when she was small. She had forgotten what it advertised but could still remember the drawing of a naked man with legs apart holding a boa constrictor by its head and tail. The snake was much longer than the man, it wound itself around his muscular outline and hissed in his face with its cleft tongue, but it was held fast in his grip. She felt a bit like that snake. She liked teasing him and showing resistance and she quite enjoyed it when he got rough. When she finally gave in, reluctantly so he had to keep a tight hold on her, it seemed as if she was also enticing him to reveal who he really was. They had been together for almost two years now. She had never lived with anyone for so long, and she had not had other men since she moved in with him. Sometimes she wondered how long it would go on. She found it hard to imagine it just continuing, but still played with the idea.

It was not so much an idea, it was almost only an image, at a restaurant, for instance, when she saw a middle-aged man helping his wife on with her coat, lifting her hair over the collar and holding the door open for her with a smile. She calculated how long they might have been together, and for a second it was herself and Otto that her eyes followed through the window of the restaurant. Two slightly round, slightly wrinkled adults walking side by side looking at tempting kitchen equipment in the shop windows, chatting casually about everyday matters. Two who knew each other’s habits, weak points and embarrassing little secrets. Maybe they were happy and serene, maybe it was a comfortable hell of mute resignation and an inexplicable bitterness. Maybe a bit of each.

She didn’t talk to Otto about such things. That would have been out of order. She thought she knew him better as time went on, and they had more or less been through all they had to tell each other about previous lovers, and what else their lives had held. There were still closed doors and dark corners in him, she could feel that, but she would not have known what to ask about if she had dared. As far as she knew he had not been with anyone else since they met, but then she was there the whole time. It was easier to reach out for her than rush around town chasing strangers. Otto was not at all the lady-killer she had believed and everyone claimed he was. He was well aware of what he did to women, but didn’t allow himself to be affected by it. On the contrary, he seemed shy and hadn’t known anything like as many as she had believed. He had not pursued her, either, she came of her own choice.

Now when she was with her women friends she sensed she had crossed an invisible threshold. Their behaviour was unchanged, almost demonstratively the same, but she could see it in their eyes. If she casually mentioned Otto she had to take pains to make him sound like a perfectly ordinary guy. As if in reality he was a monster and not the unattainable object of their green-eyed jealousy. Everything was different, she had become visible at one blow. When she and Otto showed themselves in town people were gushingly friendly to her even when she had never met them before. The ones with stature even asked about her plans and responded with evasive half-promises. She mentioned it once to Otto but he didn’t understand her. If people were nice it must be because they liked her. She thought he must be rather ingenuous to be able to appear so confident.

She was fascinated by his composure. He was the same whether they were alone or with others. She often had the feeling that it didn’t make a lot of difference if she was there or not. Just as his body closed compactly around its perfect proportions, so his interior being was apparently self-sufficient. You could plant him on a desert island or in a foreign city whose language he did not speak, and the result would be the same. He seemed like someone who could get by anywhere, in any circumstances. He could spend hours without speaking, not because he was in a bad mood. It didn’t prevent him from suddenly stroking her bum as he passed by, or bringing her a cup of coffee she hadn’t asked for.

She had moved into his flat gradually, in a series of carriers and bags. They hadn’t said much about it. Her cosmetics packed the bathroom shelves, her clothes crowded against his in the wardrobe and her paperback editions of English and American plays mounted up in piles on the floors among his thrillers and videos. It seemed neither to bother him nor make him reflect on what it was all about, where it might take them. Was it taking them anywhere, in fact? They went to London one spring and Morocco one winter, when he had a break between two films. It looked as if they belonged together.

When they were going out she occasionally asked him what he thought she should wear, but he didn’t mind whether she pulled a sweater over her head or put on a short low-necked dress. He was never jealous, and although she gave him no reason to be, that did surprise her. There were plenty of men if she had been interested. There had never been a lack of those, for her. Several times she allowed herself to be talked into a corner by some stud who had the hots for her just to see if it provoked a reaction. But Otto went on calmly chatting to his friends without looking in her direction, and she had to disentangle herself from her experimental flirtation.

It wasn’t that he was indifferent to her. For the most part he was considerate, at times downright affectionate, but just as often he left her in peace, and she could feel he expected the same from her. Now and then she asked if he would rather be alone, but he merely looked at her in amazement and smiled, as if she had said something odd. When he wanted to be alone, he went out. There was a pub round the corner where he played billiards, a rough gloomy place with tobacco-yellow crochet curtains, where none of her friends would dare set their feet.

He could make her feel invisible when he concentrated on washing up, watching television, polishing shoes or lifting weights. As if she wasn’t there. At times she felt she was nothing more than a pair of hungry eyes that clung to his detached mien and perfect body. His attacks of introspective self-sufficiency had a titillating effect on her, like the maddening, pleasurable expectation when she lay in bed giving herself up to his circling, teasing caresses. His silence could fill the flat with an atmosphere that was as agonising as it was agitating, and it completely took possession of her until her body and gaze were a swollen, quivering receptivity.

If neither of them had anything to get up for they slept late. When she woke up one spring morning he was sitting in his underpants in front of the open window sunning himself and reading the paper. She called to him but he didn’t answer. She lay watching him for a long time. The strong light glistened on the hairs on his chest and the dust motes hovering in the air. She crept over to him from behind, placed her hands on his chest and bent forward to kiss him, so her hair fell over his face. He moved his head and with a preoccupied air took hold of her chin while he went on reading, just as you pick up the loose skin on a puppy’s jaws.

She sat down on the floor under the window and rested her feet on the edge of the chair seat between his knees. His face was hidden behind the paper. She let one big toe brush his inner thigh and massaged him softly in the crutch. He did not move but she could feel it worked. Then she bent forward and coaxed his cock out of the fly. It was violet in the spring sunshine, she took it into her mouth. He moved the paper and looked at her, neutral and interested, like a spectator. She met his eyes, trying to visualise what she looked like from up there with his cock in her mouth, like one of the whores in his daydreams.

The next moment she was lying underneath him on her stomach. He forced her down with all his weight so she could barely breathe and penetrated her, pressing her face against the dusty floorboards. She enjoyed his sudden violence, like a pent-up fury suddenly let loose. It hurt her, and he came before she had a chance herself, but soon afterwards when she was in the shower feeling his warm seed running down her thighs she couldn’t help smiling at the thought that his sudden passion must express part of everything he obviously had no words for. All that was hidden behind his silence and remote gaze.

It was getting hot. Drops of sweat crawled slowly down from the roots of her hair over her nose. She lay on her stomach sniffing the smell of sweat and sun cream on her arms, the smell of summer. The little waves melted together in a winking field of reflections, and in the empty sky she saw the jet stream of a plane making its way like a needle glowing whitely. She turned and shaded her eyes with a hand. The tail of the white line spread out and dissolved into small clouds like the knobs on a backbone.

She closed her eyes. More people had arrived, children screamed when they jumped into the water, and the adult voices blended together so she couldn’t hear what they said. The planks gave under her every time someone walked past. She stretched out her arm and let the back of her hand rest on Otto’s belly. She looked at him. He lay motionless, as if asleep. She could perfectly well have told him about her meeting with Harry Wiener when they were at breakfast the next day. They could have laughed over the Gypsy King’s unsuccessful attempt at seducing her. It was too stupid, and still more stupid of him to suspect something had happened.

Otto sat up, her hand slipped off his stomach. He looked out at the Sound. She wanted to say something, it didn’t matter what. He stood up too quickly for her to be able to catch his eye. He walked to the end of the jetty and stood for a moment with his back to her before jumping in and vanishing. A few seconds later he emerged and began to swim off.

He had looked at her without interest when she described how Harry Wiener had turned up at the dressing room unannounced and invited them all for champagne. She plastered herself with sun block, slowly and thoroughly, so she didn’t have to look straight at him all the time, as she reported what he had said about their performance. She described how happy that had made her, mostly to offset her astonishment when she came to his approaches in the car. She had taken it in good faith, she would never have dreamed that the Gypsy King could come to humble himself like that. She even exaggerated slightly and took pains to go into details about his old, rather feminine hands and how pathetically he had displayed his slobbering raunchiness. But the more she said the more she felt it sounded as if she was hiding something.

Smiling crookedly Otto said she would soon be getting an offer to play Ophelia or Juliet, it wouldn’t be long. Couldn’t she speak up for him and get him the part of Hamlet or Romeo? Or would that interfere with her plans? He said it lightly and she cuffed him on the shoulder, pretending annoyance in return for his ironical smile.

Rows of people were lying along the jetty and on the beach, so many by now it was impossible to see who was with whom. Quite close to her was a group of fragile-looking teenagers with budding breasts and bony shoulders. They whispered and giggled, now and then one of them raised herself a little and shaded her eyes as if looking for someone. At the edge of the sea a bald fat man carried a small boy in water wings. The man’s stomach wore a mat of black hair and the boy’s arms were so thin that the water wings kept sliding down to his wrists.

The wind was getting up and stirring the water into confused golden points. It whipped the sheets against the mast of a sailing dinghy keeled over on its side on the wet sand where the waves fell together and slid back. The sound reached right over to her, sharp and rhythmical, and the gusts of wind tore at the trunks of the tall beech trees in front of the sun. The top branches waved and their leaves glittered nervously in quivering sighs behind the intricate tape of smoke winding up from the cigarette between her fingers.

When she turned round Otto was on his way over to the jetty with long strokes. She lay down again. Soon she felt his heavy stride making the planks rock. He dripped over her and the cold drops woke her heated skin out of its trance. One drop fell on a lens of her shades as he sat down beside her with a sigh. The drop made the sky quiver and melt. He lit a cigarette and placed a hand on her knee. Her kneecap rested within it as in a cave. She asked if he was hungry. She sounded like a little housewife worrying about her spouse’s nourishment. He took his hand away from her knee. Not specially . . . was she? He ate in a revolting manner, it was the only unpleasant thing about him. She had never thought much about it, merely noticed it. He smacked his lips and bent over with a protective arm round his plate as he shovelled in his food with his right hand and looked around scowling as if he was afraid someone might come and steal it.

He asked if she would like to go. Obviously he too was at a loss for something to talk about. As they cycled into town she asked herself whether she had invited the Gypsy King to try it on when she met his eyes in the dressing-room mirror. Maybe she had waited too long to look away or else she had taken her eyes off him too quickly as if feeling herself seen through. She bit her under-lip in irritation. Couldn’t you look around as you liked? It might well be that she had wondered for a second what impression she had made on him, and so what? Surely her thoughts were her private property. Besides he had seemed to mean what he said about her performance. Could it all have been just a manoeuvre, a stage in the cunning strategy of seduction?

It was her first leading role and she had been dreadfully nervous. When Otto came home the afternoon before the première she had been standing in the living room doing voice exercises. He had bought a CD of Iggy Pop and played it at once, throwing himself on the sofa and starting to roll a joint. She caught his eye and narrowed her lips. He asked with false innocence if the music worried her. She went into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. The drone of Iggy Pop’s voice penetrated through the door with its monotonous bass and throbbing drums. On the other side of the narrow back yard she could look into a kitchen lit by an unshaded light bulb behind the dirty window. An old man in a net vest stood at the stove. His back was bent, it faced her so she saw only his bony shoulders and prominent shoulder blades in the vest, which was too big for him. He was frying bacon, she could smell it.

She took a deep breath and produced a low note that rose like a column from her diaphragm, as she had been taught. Then Iggy Pop started up again. She lay down on the bed, she couldn’t remember a single line, and in three hours she had to be on stage. She turned and in surprise regarded the little dark spot spreading over the pillowcase, as if it was not hers, the tear sucked in by the finely woven cotton.

During the curtain calls Lucca couldn’t understand how they had pulled it off so well. She didn’t know whether she had been good or bad, she had merely followed the patterns laid down by the words and movements, mechanically like a toy train that rushes confidently around on its rails. But everybody talked of how she had lived the part, so full of genuine feeling. She was the centre of the first-night party, everyone wanted to kiss her and give her a big hug, even people she had only met once. She allowed herself to revel in it without holding back. Otto stayed in the background, he spent the evening in a corner with one of his friends. When she walked past them she could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

When they got home he did not spare her his outspoken opinion of the play, and when he read the reviews, which all emphasised her performance, he snorted and warned her not to let herself be flattered by such a pack of fawning poodles. She asked if he was jealous, but that was showing off, she didn’t believe it herself. It was not a great success with audiences, and the flowers she had been given, gift-wrapped like the ones at the big theatres, withered after a day or two. Otto was the one who threw them out, the flat stank like a bloody brothel. He said it in his usual studiedly bragging tones, as he did when he wanted her to understand he didn’t really mean it. But why couldn’t he grant her a spot of success, when he wallowed in admiration like a happy pig in his mud?

She thought of the contrast between Harry Wiener’s sympathetic, eloquent compliments and Otto’s scornful comments. Who was she to believe? Maybe neither of them. Obviously the Gypsy King had had his demonstrable reasons for smothering her with his wit, but why couldn’t Otto be generous about her success? Was he jealous, after all? In her scattered thoughts on the way home from swimming she confused the order of events, and saw Otto’s scorn after the première as a reaction to the Gypsy King’s erotic tricks three weeks later.

Maybe Otto had foreseen what might happen in the wake of her first outstanding reviews and the first newspaper interview she had ever given, in which she was presented with doe eyes, long legs and high acting ideals. Maybe he even felt that all the attention she was suddenly getting was a threat to his right of possession to what lay hidden behind those very eyes and between those very legs. If she had wanted to she could easily have stayed there in the Gypsy King’s Mercedes. She could have gone up with him just like that into the legendary roof-top apartment where so many had gone before her, a little shy, a little girlish, with a coquettishly nervous hand constantly running through her hair, with her coat still on, as he mixed drinks and told stories about his meetings with Bergman and Strehler.

Otto cycled fast, as if trying to throw her off, and she had to tramp on the pedals to keep up. Sweat stung her forehead and her cheeks and made her blouse stick. When they had to stop at a red light she rode up beside him. She held on to his shoulder for support without putting her feet down, while the crossing traffic passed in a blue mist of exhaust and dazzling reflections. She couldn’t see his eyes behind all the shining movement in his shades. He smiled as he put out a hand and moved a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and stuck to her forehead. She felt like kissing him, but the lights changed to green.

She ought to be glad he had shown a touch of jealousy at the Gypsy King’s come-on. It must be proof that after all she meant more to him than he cared to shout about. But that wasn’t like him, it was more like Daniel. It was ironic, she hadn’t thought of him for several months. Perhaps he was still sitting with his broken heart in his lap picking at the scabs.

She had never promised him anything. She broke it to him gently, at the same time safe-guarding herself. He sat on the piano stool staring down at the lid covering the keys. She could see herself, legs crossed, as a misty shining reflection in the curving instrument. The grand piano took up a third of the room, and his unmade mattress occupied another third. There was just room in between for the small table where he wrote out his scores. Here he spent most of his time bent over his bizarre music with its scattered, shrill notes and confused chords written for an orchestra he only heard in his own dark curly head. She had been fascinated by the invisible aura that spread around him when he played to her so that even the depressing surroundings took on a mystic air. He raised his head and looked at her through little steel spectacles. She stood up and walked to the window. He said he loved her. It was all very sad.

At the end of his street there was a damp-stained viaduct, and on the corner a run-down discount supermarket boasted garish posters advertising special offers. From the window she could look down on the street in front of an auto-repair shop. Splotches of bird mess shaped like flames covered the skylights and the cracked asphalt was blotched with oil. A tree stood in a corner of the yard, and even its roots were black with oil where they emerged from the asphalt. It was raining, the drops struck the window with a muffled sound and speckled the view with little pearl-shaped domes in which earth and sky changed places.

She turned round when she had taken in the scene’s inventory of details. He asked who it was. He had been badgering her for a month at all hours of the day, at the Drama School, in cafés, on the telephone. He had burst in to pester her in the middle of the night in the crazed hope that she could be persuaded to love him. As if sheer dogged persistence could serve his cause. She conjured up Otto’s secretive face, which she had been studying that very morning in bed while he was still asleep, to note each particular of it. The uneven arch of his brow beneath the long fair hair, strong eyebrows, broad nose and full lips.

Daniel had been jealous from the start, even when he had her to himself. On the other hand he could be happy in his ignorance, when she came straight from another man to visit him in his ascetic apartment. She felt like a dazzling guest from a differently callous and profligate world, and she marvelled at how abruptly reality could change in the space of a few hours. He gave her tea in the English faience cups he had inherited from his grandmother as he described the piece he was composing. She let him talk and studied the pictures on the tea cups of romantic lovers reclining in little rowing boats, rocked by tiny waves on a lake in the moonlight, surrounded by mountain peaks, tall trees and reeds swaying gently in the wind.

When they lay together on his mattress he could go into ecstasies over her high-heeled shoes and lace underclothes and the black stockings mingled with his biographies of composers and symphony scores like sexy meteorites come flying from space to land in the midst of his solitude. She had enjoyed closing her eyes and listening when he spoke of his music or read aloud to her from the Bhagavad Gita or Omar Khayyam. She had taken pleasure in playing with the idea of the oddness in the combination of him and her, but it had been only a game, an idea.

It had never occurred to her that it would be other than what it was. That he should be the man to exclude all other men. She had certainly not anticipated much. She had deferred all anticipations to some indefinite time, completely open to what might happen. The future had been white and untouched, and she had felt about it as you do when you open the door of a house in the country one morning when snow has fallen. You hesitate on the threshold, hardly having the heart to go outside and leave tracks in the unbroken whiteness where only the blackbirds’ claws have left simple dots and dashes that end as abruptly as they begin.

She had liked Daniel best when he sat at his piano and seemed to forget she was there. Something hard and decisive came over his mouth and eyes when he bent over the instrument, head slightly on one side. As if the music hid itself somewhere inside the black, varnished box, and he had to search for it with the keys, blindly, infinitely careful not to chase it away. There was a restrained strength in the touch of his hands on the chords, his fingers moving so swiftly and precisely. On the keys his hands displayed a disciplined confidence at odds with his clumsy, vague way of caressing her in bed.

As soon as he looked up his expression took on a short-sighted, otherworldly look. When she embraced him she could feel a sudden urge to protect him from colliding with hard reality. But she did not listen when he moved close to her and whispered tenderly in her ear. His adoring words and humble fondling were like a sticky web spun around her, and she wanted to provoke him into forcing a more dangerous, unfathomable music out of her than her conventional sighs rewarding his efforts. She did not believe him when, breathless and blissful, he told her how wonderful she was. He hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, she didn’t deserve the words he took into his mouth.

But she did not properly understand that until she met Otto. Strangely enough, for Otto made her feel stupid and bungling, not because of anything he said but simply by letting his expressionless blue eyes rest on her unguarded face. In her thoughts she kept on returning to the morning she rang his doorbell with his jacket over her shoulder and a churning feeling in her stomach. He had just smiled and pulled her inside in a long, astonishing kiss. He could do what he liked, she had come of her own will.

She had been around a good deal, and men had passed through her life, young or slightly older, more or less briefly. She had been in love with some of them, until they submitted completely and reached out for her like shipwrecked sailors about to drown. Others had been more cautious, whether they were married and remorseful or just saw her as a gorgeous lay, available when the urge came over them. She had day-dreamed about them for months on end until her dreams were threadbare from being dreamed over and over again.

Otto was different, he didn’t beg for love, and he didn’t run away either, as she gradually stopped bothering to hide her feelings behind a mask of uncommitted ease. She was tired of throwing off emotional, snivelling guys who dreamed of nothing but tying her down. But she was equally exhausted from being a fuckable doll dreaming her sweet dreams of exciting, unattainable men who lay pumping between her legs like creatures possessed. When Otto embraced her she had no wish to flee or dream.

They had stayed in his bed that first day. She questioned him about the boy in America who had been sent a red car by post from his far away, unknown father. He didn’t mind her asking, but when he replied, in a curt and matter-of-fact way, he made it sound like a kind of technical hiccup. A child clearly belonged to life’s contingencies. All the same she couldn’t help musing over the unknown areas in him no one had infiltrated before. Maybe he himself was unaware of them. While she lay in the twilight looking into his shadowy face, she fantasised about being the one who, like a traveller on a voyage of discovery, found and charted the blank spots in his interior and one day had them named after her.

One rainy day a few weeks later when she went to see Daniel she knew it was the last time. He played her a new piece he had just finished. She sipped the hot tea and gazed at the romantic pair on the cup in their rowing boat in moonlight. The black and white keys were reflected in his spectacles. His face was closed in concentration in a way that made her recall he was actually several years older than she was. It was only when he played that she thought of it. She hoped he would go on, that the music wouldn’t come to an end, maybe because she knew what was coming, but also because that was how she liked to see him, buried in himself and his music.

She turned to the window again to avoid his suffering gaze and looked through the drops down at the yard of the car workshop. One of the branches swayed and spread a little silver cloud of drops around it when a bird flew up and vanished in an irregular lurching curve. A skinny tabby cat slunk along the fence with lithe steps and bent head. It stopped, lifted its head and sniffed, ears laid back. Cautiously it stretched out a paw, tested the cracked asphalt and drew the paw back again before sitting down with its tail curled round its forepaws, nonchalant and completely motionless as if it had sat there always.

She felt Daniel’s hands on her hips and his breath against her neck. He loved her. Remorse struck her in the stomach with a hard, cold blow, but only one, immediately followed by a totally different feeling. It rushed through her with its warmth, as if guilt had released it. She visualised Otto. He could have her if he liked, whether he wanted her or not. That was how it had to be, and no one could help it. But if it hadn’t been for Daniel, she might not have felt it so simply, so clearly.

Couldn’t they be together one last time? She turned towards him. He looked at her with a strange expression, as if nothing mattered to him. He couldn’t mean that. He blushed. Would she do that for him? He tried to kiss her, she turned her head away, he went on pestering. Then she gave in, as amazed as he was, and while it happened for the last time she looked into his ignominious, despairing face, but it was not so much contempt she felt, and in fact not pity either. Most of all it resembled gratitude.

She could still feel the heat from asphalt and walls even though the sun had disappeared behind the houses when they rode down their street. The sky over the roofs was yellow. Otto went on round the corner to get a pizza. She couldn’t make out how the staircase could smell of wet dog when it had not rained for a fortnight. A pile of trash mail was on the floor inside the door and among it a couple of letters, one for Otto from the inspector of taxes, the other for her. The corner of the envelope bore the Royal Theatre logo. She registered that without thinking, maybe because she was tired after the cycle trip and the hours in the sun. Then she tore open the envelope, went over to the window and unfolded the letter.

It held just a few lines, signed by a secretary. In the coming season the theatre was putting on August Strindberg’s The Father, directed by Harry Wiener. One of the women actors had fallen pregnant and would therefore not be able to play the part of Bertha, the daughter of the cavalry captain, as planned. Would Lucca consider taking her place? To further their planning, she was asked to respond within a week. She could feel she had caught the sun, her cheeks felt stretched and burning. A light was switched on behind a window on the other side of the building site and she saw a small figure walking up and down in the yellow square. She stuffed the letter back in its envelope and put it in the pocket of her jacket. She could hear Otto on the stairs.

They ate in front of the television and drank beer. Neither of them said anything special. Otto sat with his feet on the sofa table among the beer bottles and the empty pizza box, lazily watching a hit man in a dirty vest empty the magazine of his submachine gun with a resentful twitch of the jaw. She picked up a magazine and leafed through the pages of pretty girls showing off the summer fashions, strolling along with head on one side in the evening sunshine, now among slim palms in a Moroccan oasis, now beneath the wet laundry and drawn blinds above the balconies of an alleyway in Lisbon.

Later that evening they met up with some friends at a bar. Lucca fingered the folded letter in her pocket. She could have told him about it while they were at home, but Otto had been lost in his film. She felt irritated at having hidden it instead of leaving it out so he could find it for himself. As if she felt guilty. The place was packed and the crowd swayed back and forth every time someone pushed over to the bar counter. Standing beside Otto in the din of music and voices it dawned on her that she had been given the chance she had dreamed of ever since she hit on the idea of becoming an actor. Obviously Harry Wiener had meant what he said. She looked round at the clusters of faces. One day they would all know who she was. She felt a bit ashamed at the thought but couldn’t help thinking it.

She caught sight of a tall man standing at the end of the bar bending over a beautiful girl. She was sure she had seen him before but could not remember where. He wore an elegant black jacket and his curly hair was cut short. The girl’s face was thickly powdered and her breasts looked as if at any moment they might burst out of the bulging C cups. She smiled with her red lips and nodded assent to what the man was saying. Lucca recognised his self-effacing smile and awkward gesticulations. He seemed to have overcome the worst of his shyness, but where were his spectacles? Daniel had obviously taken to contact lenses.

She pushed her way over to them. When he caught sight of her she could see how he swallowed before smiling, but otherwise there was not much left of his old uncertainty. He introduced Lucca and the inflated beauty to each other. Her name was Barbara, and she widened her nostrils as she smilingly took Lucca’s measure with her large dramatic eyes. They had just come back from a festival of new music in Munich, where he had conducted one of his works. He had even been interviewed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He managed to make quite a story of it. She said it was nice to see him and kissed his cheek before going on to the toilets.

She held her hands under the cold tap for a long time. The water splashed up on the mirror and she met her own eyes behind the trickling drops as she pressed her hands to her sore red cheeks. She shouldn’t have stayed so long in the sun. Did Daniel also read Omar Khayyam’s love poems to Barbara with the big breasts? Did she drink Chinese tea from a cup with romantic dreamers in the moonlight, while he entertained her with his twelve-tone serenades? And if he did? When she forced her way back through the crowd and the fog of cigarette smoke again, Daniel and Barbara had left. Otto followed her with his eyes from the end of the bar. Lucca smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back, merely looked at her as if he had caught sight of something she was not aware of. She said she was tired. He could stay on if he liked.

It was warm, the window was open and she lay naked under a sheet, listening to the sounds of the city, the voices from other apartments, and the hollow rattling from the container in the yard when the chef of the Egyptian restaurant took the rubbish out. An Arabian song came from the restaurant kitchen, a woman’s wailing voice accompanied by abrupt drums and strings. She pondered on Otto’s calculating expression when she returned from the toilet. She lay absolutely still, listening. At last she heard the street door slam downstairs and recognised his quick step as he climbed. She closed her eyes. The sound of steps came closer and stopped suddenly. Then she heard the rattle of his keys, the lock clicked and the door opened. The floorboards in the hall creaked and a moment later she heard him peeing into the lavatory pan and the explosion of water when he flushed it away.

He came into the bedroom. She felt the soft air on her breasts, stomach and thighs when he lifted the edge of the sheet. She imagined his hands, their dry warmth and firm grip. She didn’t move, holding her breath as she waited, tense and excited. Her nipples gathered into two small hard spikes and she felt her pores open wide like so many baby birds’ gaping beaks, stretched in the air, hungrily piping.

Nothing happened. Afterwards she couldn’t tell how long she had been lying there waiting before she felt the mattress give under him as he sat up on the edge of the bed. She heard the metallic click of his lighter and breathed in the smell of cigarette smoke. She opened her eyes. He was still in his jacket. He sat with his back to her looking out into the courtyard. She asked for a drag. He turned and passed her the cigarette. She could not see his face, he was just a dark outline against the open window. He took back the cigarette and knocked off the ash into the ashtray on the floor between his feet. There was something they needed to talk about.

It was quiet down in the courtyard. He inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke in rings that hovered like soft zeroes in front of the lavender blue sky. Yes? She tried to sound relaxed but was unsuccessful. Her stomach contracted. Maybe he had found the letter from the Royal Theatre in her pocket. But after all, it was only an offer of a job. Nothing had happened between her and the Gypsy King. She had told him all there was to tell, and as she spoke he had looked at her in a disinterested way that reassured her. They had even made a joke of it. How had it come to be a problem? Why hadn’t she just shown him the letter?

She cleared her throat. What was it? Her voice was faint and dry. She propped herself on an elbow and looked at his dim silhouette. It was no good, he was sorry. She sat up in bed and pulled the sheet around her. What was no good? He turned towards the window. It would be best if they stopped here. The bluish light from outside fell on one side of his face. She could hardly recognise him. Was there someone else? He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. If she really wanted to know . . . She looked up at him. Was it someone she knew? He went over to the door. He would spend the night somewhere else. It would probably be best if she moved out tomorrow.