Else’s loneliness had acquired a purposeful character. All those men, thought Lucca, only to end up sitting alone in her childhood home surrounded by the wreckage of three marriages in the shape of furniture in various styles, according to the differing taste of the men and what had been in fashion at the time. Lucca was fascinated by her mother’s transformations as they came to light in the pictures of her.

With her first husband she had been a coquettish high-heeled blonde with narrow sunglasses and projectile breasts, undulating along in one checked suit after the other. Lucca couldn’t remember his name. With Giorgio Else had become a hennaed hippie in loosely fitting Indian cotton, and when Ivan came on the scene she turned into an authoritative career woman in dark, tailored jackets. Else laughed at herself, how could she have fallen for that Jacqueline Kennedy hat or that djellaba with embroidery around the collar. She did not seem surprised at the actual transformations, times changed, she had merely gone along with them.

Ivan ran an advertising agency. He had a square, brutal face and was always tanned, but Lucca wasn’t sure whether that was sun or whisky. His voice was very deep and she could hear how he loved it. He always sounded authoritative and effective, rather like pilots when they announce the cruising height and calculated flying time, so a feeling of shaving lotion and optimism fills the cabin. When he came back from one of his numerous business trips he always brought Lucca a gigantic box of chocolates. She felt suffocated by all that chocolate and the shame of accepting his bribes.

At first she didn’t believe it when Else told her he had moved in. She could not imagine a man more different from Giorgio and the other men who had lived with them for a short or longer spell. They had all been actors, journalists or architects, and Ivan didn’t suit the vegetating jumble of shabby heirlooms, palsied cane furniture and wilting pot plants. Oceans of newspapers, magazines and books flowed everywhere, and housework was done only when strictly necessary once a month when Else made a trip through the rooms with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But in a trice everything was transfigured. The cane furniture was replaced by bent-wood chairs, an opulent leather sofa made its entrance in company with a sofa table made of marble, and the walls of the damp-stained hovel were painted so white they made Lucca’s eyes hurt.

Else herself underwent a gradual transformation. She started to shave her armpits and cut her long hair. She was a different woman in her new buckled shoes, lipstick and eye shadow, and pale stripes. Previously lazy and untidy, she now radiated energy when she got home from broadcasting and served up a beautifully prepared dinner in no time. Formerly she had not been slow to put her changing lovers in their place with a sharp, cynical remark. Now she smiled in a feminine way as she listened to Ivan’s boring, self-satisfied accounts of the brilliant concept he had proposed for some campaign or other for a bank or a travel firm or a new kind of toffee. She was quite simply in love.

Lucca had to ask herself how this same woman could have fallen in love with her father. At dinner she mentioned Giorgio several times, but Ivan did not allow himself to be affected. He questioned them with interest about his predecessor, and although his cold-bloodedness irritated Lucca, she managed to enjoy seeing Else squirm as she answered his questions in subdued tones. No, they had no contact with him apart from an occasional postcard and a present every few years when he remembered Lucca’s birthday. That’s very strange, Ivan thought, giving Lucca a sympathetic glance that infuriated her.

Else laughed a lot when she was with Ivan, and it was no longer the ironical, at times scornful laughter as when she and her women friends sat in the kitchen drinking white wine and telling stories about the stupidity of men. It was open, unrestrained laughter, as if above all she was laughing at herself. Her laughter often left her smiling unconsciously, lost in wonder at what had happened to her. Ivan made her laugh, as Lucca faintly remembered her laughing when Giorgio picked her up and carried her out into the cold waves, kicking and flinging out her arms and legs.

She was thoughtful when she came down to the kitchen in the mornings. Previously she had talked like a machine-gun. Now she was the one who, distrait and delayed, looked up from her mug of coffee and asked Lucca to repeat what she had just said. Lucca thought that perhaps it didn’t matter who made her mother happy, and the thought confused her. Over the years Else had known so many men, one face had succeeded another like the numbers on a wheel of fortune clicking past the little peg that always reminded Lucca of the fuse on a huge firecracker. As if the whole tombola and its contents of gigantic teddy bears would explode in crackling fireworks if the wheel of fortune revolved too fast and started to shoot out sparks. But the wheel didn’t bolt, it stopped at Ivan. He was to be the lucky teddy bear Else could hug at night.

They were married, in church, the year after Lucca’s matriculation. She felt that she had landed up in the middle of a film under production and was forced to stay in the pew because the camera kept running. Incredulously she watched her mother in the low-cut, slit wedding dress of cream Thai silk as she walked alone up the aisle, with Ivan waiting at the altar, shining with sweat in his dress-suit. In the past, when she sat in the kitchen with her hennaed friends, Else always had a ruthless comment at the ready on bourgeois marriage as disguised prostitution. Now she herself had taken to it like another prize cunt in gift-wrap.

At the reception Lucca was surprised to find she knew so few of the guests. Most of them were Ivan’s friends, but many seemed more like business contacts than what one understands as friends. At Lucca’s table the talk was of segments and communications strategy. She slipped away during the bridal waltz and didn’t come home until late. Else sat on the kitchen table with a cigarette in one hand and a sausage sandwich in the other, in her white corsage and white silk stockings and suspender belt. Her thighs bulged out in the bare patch above the stockings and her bra was so tight it looked as if she had four breasts. Laughter bubbled up in Lucca’s throat, she could not stop it. Else looked stiffly at her for a moment, deathly pale, then she put the sandwich down on the worktop, jumped off the table and slapped her.

Lucca couldn’t remember ever having been beaten. Wordlessly she left the kitchen and went up to her room. Her cheek still burned and she regretted her cruel laughter. The next morning she apologised to Else. Ivan had gone to work and they sat over their coffee mugs as usual. Else stroked her cheek, the same cheek. She must try to understand, even if it might be hard. Else looked at her with tired, sorrowful eyes. She wanted this. She was going to try for happiness, and no-one, not even Lucca, would stop her.

That summer Lucca stayed at the villa as little as possible, she often slept with a girlfriend. She took a job as an assistant at a nursery school. None of her friends were in town, she was on her own, Else and Ivan spent most of the time at the holiday cottage. They drove into town together every day and Ivan fetched her from Radio House in the evening. Lucca hardly ever saw them. The school holidays had begun and there were only a few children left at the nursery school. It was an easy job, she spent most of the time at the playground sitting in the sun smoking with the teaching staff, while the children took care of themselves.

One afternoon it was her turn to lock up. One of the children was still waiting to be fetched, a boy of three. He anxiously asked where his father was. She took out a puzzle for him. In the end he started to cry. She sat cuddling the sniffing child until finally his father turned up, red in the face and full of excuses. He had been at an important meeting.

She had not seen him before. Usually the mother fetched the boy. He might be any age between thirty and forty, his short hair was grizzled, but his face looked young. He picked up the boy and stretched out his free hand. Apparently he thought they should say goodbye properly now he had let her wait so long. He fetched the boy on the following days as well, and every time he went out of his way to ask if it had been a good day, smiling shyly.

He was good-looking, broad-shouldered with a narrow waist, and there was something lithe about his movements, but she did not give much thought to that before she met him one Saturday afternoon, cycling. His hair was wet and stood on end and he wore a sleeveless vest so you could see his brown, sinewy upper arms. A badminton racket stuck out of a bag on his luggage carrier. He had been playing, he said needlessly, awkward because of the unexpected meeting, then plucked up courage and invited her for a beer.

His shyness reassured her, although he was twice as old as she was. He seemed like a contemporary who had happened to be born much earlier. He turned out to be easy to talk to, and he smiled boyishly at nothing. Later on she remembered him for his restrained strength, as if he was afraid of hurting her. It was the first time she had had an affair with a man who was so much older than herself.

It lasted a month. He visited her in the evening once or twice a week, and he always remembered to have a shower before cycling home. They had the villa to themselves, but the risk of Else or Ivan happening to turn up only made her nervous and still more impatient when she was waiting for him. They used the mahogany bed in Else and Ivan’s room, where Else and Giorgio had slept in their time and where she had crept into her father’s warmth under the duvet on Sunday mornings. She liked thinking of that when she looked at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door, infatuated and marvelling as she sat there astride a strange, married man in the selfsame bed.

In the days that passed between their meetings she felt she was moving in a different world. The dangerous and dramatic world where each of them carried the secret of the other. She thought of him practically all the time, both when she was alone and in the playground listening with half an ear to what the teachers were saying. She watched his son running around among the other children, knowing nothing of what his father got up to with her in a strange house when he had kissed him goodnight and cycled off with his racket. Was she in love? She did not know. She always remembered him somewhat differently from what he was when they were once again in Else’s bed. She felt more in love with him when they were not together and she cycled through town alone, surrounded by the invisible aura of their secret.

He did not come for his son so often any more, but the few times he did she was surprised at how good he was at seeming natural. Her legs started to tremble when she caught sight of him. He even looked into her eyes as he bade her a smiling farewell with the boy on his arm, as if they had never been closer than that. Usually his wife came. She had short hair and looked like a mouse with her pointed nose and receding chin. It seemed a bit strange to greet her, but not as strange as she had feared. The trysts with her husband took place in a world where the mouse-faced woman did not exist. Just as Lucca did not exist either in the safe, everyday world in which she was only the assistant who looked after the woman’s child.

The mahogany bed in the quiet villa was a white island in the twilight, an enchanted island where you forgot what you had left behind. A secret island where you could live a whole life without becoming a day older than you were when you went ashore. He was only a dark figure on the white sheet in the dusk, and she felt she put everything she had known behind her when she slowly undressed before him and felt the air from the open window on her skin. She closed her eyes and he caressed her cautiously until she could wait no longer. When at last he penetrated her it felt as if she split in two lengthways and her limbs and bones parted from each other, light and delicate as birds’ bones. She imagined they were held together by his hard sinewy arms, that she would float away on the wind if he let go, and she clung to him so that he should hold her still tighter and pierce still deeper inside her and split her into even smaller, even more splintered and vanishing fragments.

One evening when she lay listening to the water running onto the bathroom tiles, she heard a muted sobbing from in there. She went into the corridor and opened the door. He was crouching under the shower with his head between his knees and his hands folded around his neck. The water trickled down his back, which shuddered rhythmically in time with his sobs. She squatted down beside him and was about to put her arm round his shoulders, but something made her stop, she didn’t know what. Maybe it was the sight of a grown man sitting on the tiled floor weeping. He stood up, found a towel and went into the bedroom. She sat on the bed watching him dress. When he had laced up his shoes he said they would have to stop meeting. He was suddenly very calm. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. What? He glanced at her briefly. Nothing . . . She followed him with her eyes from the window as he disappeared on his bicycle with his badminton racket sticking out of the sports bag on his luggage carrier. The next day she called the nursery school and handed in her notice.

She went up to the holiday cottage that afternoon. Ivan sat reading in the garden. He had on a faded T-shirt and sandals, almost playing the part of an ageing hippie with a haircut, and not the dynamic advertising chief who talked like an energetic pilot. She had never seen him with a book before. He got to his feet when she went into the garden, not specially surprised, it seemed. He explained, almost apologetically, that Else was working late and would probably come the next day. But she would stay? He had bought a large steak, there would be enough for two. Actually he was one of those people who could get a bit sick of fish. Lucca smiled, and he looked inquiringly at her, awkwardly waving the book he still held in his hand. It was a yellowing paperback, he had found it on the book shelf, The Outsider by Camus. He hadn’t read it for years. He had read a lot when he was young, he added, as if frightened she might not believe him.

He was different, more subdued than usual, friendly without seeming to launch a charm offensive. It struck her that he behaved like someone at home with himself. They were both at home, but they behaved very politely, as if they were also each other’s guest. He opened a bottle of white wine, she brought glasses. They sat in the garden talking of Camus. The best thing in the book was the beginning, he thought. The descriptions of an oddly stupefied life, the heat and the sea, the women, the monotony. The feeling of being anonymous, as if everything was at one and the same time very close and yet distant. That was how he had felt for years, until he met her mother.

He had worked and worked, he hadn’t really done much else, there hadn’t been time for private life, nor had it interested him. In fact nothing had interested him. Maybe his work, when he was immersed in it, but otherwise . . . He had known various women, but each time he had let it fall apart. He had had the feeling of being adrift, as if in a boat without oars, taken by the current, just on and on, he had no idea where.

He had never believed he was suited to living in a permanent relationship. Perhaps he wasn’t, he added with a smile, time would tell. He looked down at his glass, embarrassed. It wasn’t always easy, he went on after a pause. Her mother was demanding, but she knew everything about that, of course. And when you both had a past . . . they weren’t so young any more. Enthusiasm alone . . . he smiled again and left the sentence hanging in the air.

Lucca looked at him, attentive to every single word and gesture. She felt her gaze made him shy, he dared only respond to it for a second at a time. The rest of the time he looked ahead or studied the creases in his trousers, smoothing them thoughtfully with his palm. For the first time she glimpsed what Else must have seen in him behind the façade of self-confidence, shaving lotion and expensive habits. Something lonely and unguarded which at moments came in sight on his face, almost innocent in his appeal for understanding or at least acceptance.

He opened another bottle at dinner time. They ate outside as they did when Else was there. He asked her what she was going to do. She didn’t know what to say. Travel, she said. Maybe she wanted to be an actor. It sounded naïve. She had not really thought through the idea herself, and Else had not been particularly encouraging when she heard that her daughter was thinking of repeating the foundered ambitions of her own youth. She did not consider it the right thing for Lucca and asked what made her think she had any acting talent? But Ivan seemed to take her seriously.

She had radiance, anyway. He didn’t know anything about drama, but he knew something about radiance, about presence. She seemed very mature, he felt, older than she was. But luckily she was still too young to mind being told that. He smiled and winked at her. Lucca was about to get irritated at his wink and the way he pronounced the word presence when he asked why she didn’t go and look for her father. She said she didn’t even know where he lived. But she could probably find out! It was important for her, more so than she might realise. He had eyes in his head . . .

He looked at her, and now it was Lucca’s turn to look down. But who was he to sit here and talk twaddle, he went on reassuringly and started to talk about his childhood. His parents had sent him to boarding school when they were divorced. His mother was said to have found someone else. His father prevented him from seeing her but he didn’t discover that until he had grown up and it was too late. Imagine living in hatred of your mother, he said, and then finding you had been wrong. Again she caught a glimpse of something vulnerable in his eyes, as if a boarding-school boy stood on tiptoe inside him, in shorts and with grass on his knees, squinting through the cracks in the hardened mask his face had turned into with the years.

He had bought strawberries. He opened the third bottle of wine, although she protested. Had their wedding been ghastly? She shrugged her shoulders and let him fill her glass. It had been Else’s idea. She put her feet up on the chair and leaned back, supporting her glass against her knees. She felt drowsy in a pleasant way. To have a white wedding, he went on, lifting his glass. She thought of Else’s thighs, bulging out in the bare patch between her stockings and suspender belt when they met in the kitchen on her wedding night. He looked over at the edge of the woods before drinking.

He could well have done without such an exhibition, himself. He sought her eyes again. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, sipping her wine. He perfectly understood why she had made herself scarce. He himself had felt like heading off just then, he smiled, that is, if it hadn’t been for Else. But she had been so happy that day. Lucca nodded. The strawberries were big and dark red, she ate them with her fingers and bit them off at the stalk. The juice made her lips sting slightly. He asked if she would like coffee. She said she felt like an early night. It had been nice, he went on. Yes, she replied, and met his eyes. He thought they understood each other better.

Not until she lay down did she realise how drunk she was. The air was hot and stuffy in the little room. She opened the window and threw off the duvet, felt the coolness on her naked body, curled up with her knees under her chin as she had done when as a little girl she had crept up close to Giorgio in the mornings. The wine made her dizzy although she lay quite still. She felt the room turning slowly around her, if she herself wasn’t turning, as if she was in a boat without oars, adrift on the whirling currents that carried her along in circles, on and on through the half-dark summer night.

She thought of the weeping badminton player under the shower and of his strong arms that had crushed her and at the same time held her together so she should not break apart and be blown away like the almost weightless remains of a disintegrated bird. It already seemed so remote, something she had long since left behind. She turned and turned, floating unceasingly on the current, and with a little, strangely happy pain it came to her that she had felt his hands for the last time when she lay like this curled around herself, as he lay beside her with his tensed stomach against her spine and pressed his warm, hard cock between her thighs.

But it was neither his hands nor his cock she felt and it was not like gliding from a doze into a dream. It was like awakening, not to reality, but from a misty dream to one that was crude and sharp, when, as if struck by an electric shock, she turned round and kicked. Ivan fell on the floor with a crash, pale in the dim light and with an erection that looked both comical and macabre in the midst of his flaccid nakedness. She had pushed herself into the furthest corner of the bed and pressed against the wooden wall with the duvet held tightly around her. Out, she screamed, out, get out! He rose, swayed and looked at her in despair before going out and closing the door behind him. She remained in her corner, shaking all over. Soon afterwards she heard his car start and the gravel on the road crunch beneath the tyres as he drove away. When she began to breathe calmly she got out of bed and dressed.

She walked along the cycle path through the plantation although it was a detour, shivering among the spruce trees in the dim light. When she came down to the harbour she looked anxiously around her, but could not see Ivan’s car anywhere. No one was about. She sat on a bench near the ferry quay and looked across at the fishmongers’ empty window-panes, where a crooked little moon shone above the marble counter and the posts along the quay and their floating shadows on the undulations of the calm water. The last ferry had sailed. She was afraid of falling asleep while she waited, and it was like a cut in a film, dreamless and without transition when the sun roused her and she rose, dazed, from the bench and saw the cars boarding the ferry, clattering over the steel ramp.

She put her hands on the varnished rail and felt the faint quivering of the engine’s vibrations drumming through the hull. Slowly the wake opened its fan of foam in the increasing distance from the wharf beneath the little red lighthouse that had always made her think of a clown in a red jersey, with a white stripe on his stomach and his clown’s nose in the clouds. She recalled how she had stood between Giorgio and Else screwing up her eyes against the reflections on the water, like needles in a chaos of flashes. She remembered that it had been like travelling for real, far away from everything she knew.

Her mother never found out what had happened. Lucca waited before going home to the villa until she was sure Else was at work. She was thinking of the last postcard she had received from Giorgio a few days after her birthday. It was as brief as ever and written in the usual careless handwriting. The card showed an early Renaissance painting, an altarpiece with the Madonna and child, blue-white and with set features, slim, with narrow eyes, against a golden background. The card had been stamped in Florence like the others he had sent in recent years. He probably lived there. Anyway, it was all she had to go on.

She packed a bag with essentials and left a note to Else saying she was going away for a week with a friend. Then she found her passport, went to the bank and withdrew all her money. That evening she was in a train travelling south. She changed in Hamburg and slept through most of Germany, leaning on her bag. In the morning she arrived at Munich where she changed again. A few hours later she was gazing out at the spruce-clad slopes of the Tyrol.