Robert was at the kitchen sink when he heard a car in the drive. The engine stopped, a car door slammed, and soon afterwards the doorbell rang. He hesitated for a moment before going out to open the door. No one was there, but he recognised Jacob’s car behind his own. The telephone rang in the living room. He stopped on the threshold. Jacob was out on the lawn looking in at the panorama window. It was dim in the room, presumably he could only see his reflection and the clouds and trees by the fence at the end of the garden. Robert had forgotten to switch off the answering machine when he came in. The telephone was beside the window. If Robert answered it Jacob would see him. If he ignored it, it would still look as if he had just gone for a walk.

He heard his own voice saying he was not in and asking the caller to leave a message after the tone. The volume was turned up so high that Jacob must be able to hear it. He stayed on the grass. Robert was almost certain he had not seen him, but still it seemed as if their eyes met through the wide window. After the tone there was silence, and in the silence he heard someone breathing. When he recognised Lucca’s voice he could not decide whether he felt a bad conscience or annoyance at the idea of not talking to her. He went over and picked up the receiver, turning his back on the window. When he looked out into the garden a few moments later, Jacob had vanished. He heard the car start and drive away.

Her voice was muted, almost confidential, but maybe she only lowered it because there were other people in the room she was calling from. She had learned to dial for herself. Wasn’t she clever? He apologised for not having been to see her yet, and asked how she was doing. It sounded tame. She replied with a question. Had he spoken to Andreas? Robert thought of Stockholm. No, Andreas had not contacted him. Why didn’t she just call him? Surely she must have an idea where he was. She said nothing. Robert asked if he should try to call Andreas for her and at once felt cross with himself for voluntarily allowing himself to get entangled in their private complications. He had only asked to break her silence. She hesitated. Would he do it? He said yes. She wanted to see Lauritz. Maybe, if it was not asking too much, could he take the boy to see her? On a Saturday or Sunday, when he was not working? He must promise to say no if it didn’t suit him. He smiled at the small hypocrisy.

She gave him the name and address of some friends Andreas used to stay with when he was in Copenhagen. He would have to find out their number, she couldn’t remember it. He got the number from directory enquiries and called. It was engaged. He pushed open the sliding door and went outside. The sun shone through the busy clouds and made the white plastic chairs on the terrace shine so he had to narrow his eyes. He went to stand in the middle of the lawn where Jacob had been. The shining reflections of the chairs swam in the panorama window in front of the dimness of the room and the more distant, indistinct picture of his lone figure on the grass. How had he ended up here? Even if he strained his memory to the utmost, and really succeeded in tracing the order of events down to their smallest links, he had a suspicion that it would not bring him closer to an answer.

The following days were warm, the clouds dispersed, and the high pressure transformed the sky into a pale blue desert stretching all the way into town. The heat made the air quiver over the asphalt of the motorway. The wind blew in through the open windows and pulled at his shirt sleeves, and he felt light and empty-headed as the road signs increased in perspective and abruptly flew over the windscreen. He listened to The Magic Flute and quite forgot why he had set off. It was a long time since he had been in Copenhagen, and when he passed the south harbour he recalled all the times in the past when he had returned after a trip in the country, relieved to see the city towers again, the sparkling water of the harbour and the cranes above the goods trains’ marshalling yard. He could leave his job, sell the house and move back into town. He could do whatever he liked. What was he waiting for?

Noisy pop music issued from behind the door. He knocked loudly. She was as brown as cocoa and unnaturally blonde, the woman in the black slip who opened the door. Her dyed hair was short and stuck out untidily around her pinched, sun-tanned face. She looked at him enquiringly as she squeezed up her eyes to avoid the smoke from the cigarette between her lips. She had a small artificial pearl on one nostril. The apartment was at the rear of a block in the city centre and consisted of one large room with vertical wooden beams in the centre. Piles of clothes were scattered on the furniture and the unmade double bed, and the confusion of fashion garments, empty pizza boxes, used coffee cups and randomly dropped objects seemed to go with the drumming rhythm pumping out of the loudspeakers. She must have been the same age as Lucca. The bangles on her wrists jingled when she removed the cigarette and threw out a hand to show the way. She apologised for the mess and shouted to Lauritz, who was on the sofa watching television. It didn’t occur to her to turn down the music. A sun-tanned man stood at one of the windows wearing nothing but briefs, talking on a mobile. He threw a glance at Robert and nodded curtly before turning his back on them. He was athletically built and absent-mindedly caressed the muscles on one upper arm as he spoke.

Lauritz did not react, totally hypnotised by Tom and Jerry chasing each other across the screen. The woman with dyed hair looked Robert over as she called the boy. On the telephone he had introduced himself as a friend, but he could feel she was wondering if he was something else and more, this respectable substitute uncle from the provinces in his checked shirt and moccasins. He had asked for Andreas when he phoned. The woman had said he was away travelling. At last Lauritz raised his head and caught sight of them. Robert was not sure the boy recognised him, but on the other hand he did not seem shy, rather resigned, as he slid off the sofa and came to shake his hand. The woman with dyed hair walked in front of them back to the door. The man in briefs was still talking with his back turned. Robert said he would bring Lauritz back in the early evening. She turned round in the open doorway. Was it true that Lucca would never see again? How dreadful . . . She smiled at the boy and ruffled his hair before closing the door after them. Lauritz smoothed his hair as they walked downstairs.

Robert asked him if he could remember the day he and his father had driven home from the supermarket in Robert’s car. The day it rained. Lauritz thought about it. Then he asked where his father was. Hadn’t his father told him where he had gone? He couldn’t remember. As Robert drove north he glanced at the boy now and then in the rear mirror. He could only see his forehead and eyes watching him expectantly. He wished Lea had been there. He remembered how she had led the boy round the garden as if he was her little brother, when Andreas had come to deliver the leg of lamb that had been left in the car.

She had called the previous day. He was mowing the lawn and the noise of the mower almost drowned out the telephone. She laughed at his breathless voice when he answered at last. She was calling from the airport on the way to Lanzarote. He was sweating, his T-shirt stuck to his shoulder blades. Her laugh was the same as the week before when he ran after her on the beach and stumbled. He looked down at his trainers as he listened to her voice. The toes were covered with grass clippings. He wanted to say something to her but couldn’t think what. He asked her to send a postcard. She said she would and kissed the mouthpiece at the other end. It sounded funny.

Lauritz had fallen asleep when they drove into the parking place in front of the orthopaedic hospital. Robert called to him softly until he woke with a start and looked around him, rosy-cheeked and confused. As they walked towards the entrance he let go of Robert’s hand and started gathering pine cones from under the pine trees. Lucca smiled when he gave her the hard, prickly cones. Robert stood where he had stopped at the end of the terrace a nurse had directed them to. She sat in the sun on one of the deckchairs. Seen from a distance she might have been any woman smiling at her son, looking at him through her sunglasses. Lauritz climbed onto her lap and pushed his head under her chin. Robert walked up to them and the sound of his steps on the terrace floor made her lift her face. The boy looked at him watchfully. Thank you, she said. It was kind of you. She was suddenly formal, she had not been like that on the telephone. It was nothing, he said. No, was all she replied. He said he would go for a walk on the beach.

There were a lot of people there, and he felt much too dressed up and conspicuous among the anonymous bodies lying in rows in the sun. He sat down some way up the beach and took off his shoes and socks. The shrill cries of children rang out and then were swallowed by the deep sound of the breakers. The light dazzled him, reflected in the water that ran back before another wave gathered itself and slumped down on the wet sand. Kullen’s low cliffs were blue and misty, and now and again he saw a little flash over the Sound when the sun struck a passing car window in Sweden.

Robert lit a cigarette. He had not been here since Monica and he were divorced. This was the view she had stood gazing at as she smoked, one late afternoon when the other beach visitors had gone home. Yet it seemed quite a different place. There was nothing left but disconnected impressions, and he was not even sure he remembered them precisely, those fleeting moments of closeness, like coming suddenly out of the shade and meeting the sunlight. He had believed you could build on that kind of thing, and now they were in Lanzarote.

He sat there for half an hour. Occasionally he looked at the hospital’s white functionalist building, formerly a fashionable seaside hotel. He recalled the story Monica’s mother had always told when she’d had something to drink, about how the barrister had proposed to her one evening there on the dance floor, between two dances, poised and romantic in his white dinner jacket. Might he have chosen her for her dress? And if so, why not? Just as love had its consequences, so love itself was a consequence of every possible and impossible thing, small or large. He brushed the sand from his feet and stood up, put on his shoes and pushed his socks into his pocket. Small things holding some mysterious transformative power often proved surprisingly influential on one’s imagination. The luxurious way a skirt swung around a girl’s legs in time to the tunes of the age. A modestly blushing smile beneath a woollen blanket in the Alps. A white hand lazily pushing the button on an old radio and a dreamy gaze at the snow under the lamps. No more was needed.

Lucca was still on the terrace. Lauritz lay on the floor rolling his pine cones. Her long face with its high cheek-bones and straight nose seemed both melancholy and arrogant, as if shaped by an old, indomitable yet never satisfied hunger. She sat with her face lifted to the sun and a faint smile around her mouth. He did not know if the heat was making her smile or the sound of his step and the deck chair giving way beneath him.

They were silent, you could hear the sea, but only as a muted soughing beneath the staccato, clicking sound of the bristly scales on the cones Lauritz was rolling over the terrace floor. One of them landed at her feet, she bent forward and picked it up. Her fingertips investigated the hard shells along the edges. What had Andreas had to say? He has gone away, said Robert and paused. I think he is in Stockholm, he went on. Stockholm, she repeated. Yes, he probably was . . . Lauritz came up to her, she passed him the cone. He asked when she was coming home. She brushed the hair back from her forehead and pushed the unruly lock behind her ear. I don’t know, she said, stretching out her hand. The boy bent his face so her fingers could brush his cheek. He kneeled on the floor again and threw down the pine cones one after the other.

Had he got a cigarette? He offered her one and noticed how surely her hand, after a moment’s fumbling, found the pack and coaxed out a cigarette. She took hold of his wrist when she heard him ignite his lighter and bent her face so her hair fell in front of her forehead again and came dangerously close to the flame. He lifted up the lock with his free hand as she lit her cigarette. She leaned back quickly and blew out smoke, and he noticed her cheeks were slightly flushed, but that might be owing to the sun. It had reached the tops of the pine trees around the parking place, and the shadow of the terrace parapet formed a bluish triangle on the blinding white end wall. The wind made the needles of the pine trees sway in unison and moved the ash from the cigarettes over the floor tiles so it spread and took off in whirls of grey flakes. She didn’t really know where she was, he thought. Lauritz had climbed into a deckchair a little way off. He had a pine cone in his hand and looked out in front of him, it wasn’t clear what he was watching.

You haven’t told me anything about yourself, she said. I am always the one who talks. Always, he thought. Had they spent so much time together already? He brushed ash from his knee. Where should he begin? She turned towards him. Wherever he liked . . . He looked into her dark lenses, duplicating two identical twins each in his check shirt, both bent forwards, each with a cigarette in his fingers.

He knocked several times, but no one came. He knocked again, harder. There was complete silence from behind the door. Lauritz had sat down on the top step. One by one he let his pine cones tumble down the stairs. Robert tried to remember what he had said to the woman with dyed hair. He was sure he had arranged to bring the boy back in the early evening, but as the minutes went by he began to doubt. He sat down on the step beside Lauritz. Maybe she had forgotten, maybe the music had drowned out his voice. Lauritz dug him in the side with a finger. He said he was hungry. Robert looked at him. The boy’s eyes seemed older than their soft, downy surroundings. They waited patiently to know what he was planning.

They went to an Indian restaurant in the same street. Lauritz only wanted rice. As he ate he gazed around him, fascinated by the gold-painted, oriental arches of the interior, cut out of plywood and lit with mauve bulbs. Did India look like that? More or less, replied Robert and to pass the time began to tell him Kipling’s story about the civet cat. When Lauritz had finished with his rice it looked as if it had snowed on the cloth around his plate. Robert went out to call the woman with dyed hair and the muscle man. A well-educated woman’s voice answered. No contact with the mobile at present. It was nearly half past eight. He thought of what he had told Lucca about himself, about Monica and Lea. He felt he had said too much. He stood gazing blankly at the mosaic of numbers on the telephone, considering what to do with Lauritz. Then he lifted the receiver again and called his mother. She sounded surprised, he had not spoken to her for several weeks. He asked if he might call in and explained the situation to her as briefly as he could. It sounded muddled to him. When they were in the car Lauritz asked where the big girl was. Robert told him she was his daughter. Were there any civet cats in Lanzarote? Robert didn’t think there were.

The boy fell asleep on the sofa where Robert’s mother had lain reading every evening for decades. They sat on her little balcony looking out over the railway lines and the marina further away, beneath the heating station’s red-brick colossus. Did he usually drive his patients’ children around? He smiled wryly. The sky was violet blue over the Sound, and the remains of daylight glowed pale on the rails and the forest of masts and tall thin chimneys. She asked about Lea. When he replied, she fell silent. She had never said what she really thought about the divorce. She had liked Monica, they had had good talks, but she had not been all that sympathetic when he told her Monica wanted a divorce. Nor had she condemned her daughter-in-law when he told her about the morning he arrived back too early from his trip to Oslo and almost surprised her in Jan’s arms. In her opinion the episode belonged to those chance misfortunes which should not in themselves be given too much weight, and she was probably right. But her silence had had the effect of a reproach. Did she think it was all his fault? She couldn’t possibly know about his affair with Sonia. What had she seen? He had never asked her.

She looked old now, her face hung from her cheekbones and her chin in wrinkled bags, and the masculine spectacle frames seemed larger than ever. She picked up her coffee cup with a slow, slightly shaky hand and steadied the edge with her upper lip while she drank. Her eternal coffee. He had made coffee for her every morning from the time he was ten until he left home. On Sunday he had even brought it to her in bed, black as tar with masses of sugar. It was her only extravagance apart from her insatiable consumption of nineteenth-century novels. I don’t feel human until I get a cup of coffee, she would groan when she went into the kitchen in the morning, drunk with sleep she towered in the doorway, rubbing her face with her big red hands. A man’s hands, cracked, with short nails and prominent veins.

He had to make his sandwiches himself, and from early on he learned to do his own washing. She was too tired when she got home from the canteen. They shared the housework on Sunday afternoons when the others were playing football in the courtyard. She frequently sighed but otherwise she did not complain. He did what he could to avoid being a nuisance, and he never complained about the clothes she bought him once or twice a year when the sales were on. She bought summer clothes for him in the autumn and winter clothes when summer was approaching, always the cheapest you could get, they were really ghastly, of course. He was ashamed of his clothes and he was ashamed of her, and he was ashamed of being ashamed.

When he grew tired of lying in bed in the afternoons grieving over the loss of Ana, he gradually began to realise that it was not only love that had made him suffer so, but self-disgust as well. And still later, after he had married Monica, it struck him that there had been an almost tangible connection between the two emotions. With her aristocratic airs and exotic beauty Ana had made him feel a pariah. He who had writhed when he had to go to school wearing the wrong kind of trousers. It had been as clear as it was futile that she was the very one to deliver him from the curse.

But her eastern European home had not only been the gloomy background that emphasised her aristocratic and wonderful pallor when finally, one evening with snow falling outside, he was permitted to hold her face between his hands. He had continued going there long after he should have realised it was hopeless. One afternoon after another he had tea with the clarinettist while he waited for her. He accepted the humiliation merely for the sake of listening to classical records with the kind man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a quaint accent. It had been a more inviting place to be, and he had preferred it to his mother’s two-and-a-half room apartment with its view of the heating station and passing trains.

A train glided through the twilight in an arc. He looked at his mother. Neither of them had said anything for a while. They had never talked to each other a lot, not even when he lived at home. They mostly spoke of practical things and in the evenings both sat reading. Now and then she would laugh and read a snatch aloud to him, which he listened to with only half an ear. Not until he grew up did he realise that she had never really known how to get in touch with him, exhausted and remote from the world as she was. He had misunderstood her awkwardness and taken it as coldness.

The row of lit carriage windows passed across her thick, curved lenses and hid her eyes. She put a hand on the parapet and stroked the painted cement with her palm. It’s still warm, she said, smiling. From the sun . . . He touched it for himself. She was right, the cement was still quite warm. It left a fine layer of grey dust in his palm. He wiped it off on his trousers. She would have called him one of these days if he hadn’t come. Perhaps it didn’t mean so much to him to hear it, but his father was dead, she had seen the announcement in the newspaper. Again that phrase, your father, as if she herself had had nothing to do with him.

She had never mentioned him in any other way. She had hardly ever mentioned him at all, the gentlemen’s hairdresser in a distant provincial town he had once been on the point of visiting. He didn’t know what to say. He tried to realise it but could not feel anything. She tried to read his silence. She did not feel upset about it, she said, it was all so long ago. Her tone was unusually hard, almost blunt. The death announcement had been signed by the children. So he had had more than one since he left them. The funeral had taken place. She smiled briefly and looked at him as if to catch him feeling moved. Still, it was strange, he finally got out.

The strange thing was that she had ever married the man. But of course, she went on, if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been born. He lowered his eyes and lit a cigarette. Now he mustn’t think she had gone around snivelling over his father all these years. It had been a misunderstanding that they had ever got together, and it had only been an instance of the irony of fate that he was the one to take his leave . . . She stopped and drank the rest of her coffee. For a moment her face was nothing but spectacles and cup. She probably hadn’t ever told him about it. Her voice was different now, softer.

She had been the cloakroom attendant at a restaurant where there was dancing. A musician who played the bass worked there. She’d been secretly in love with him for months, and finally he caught sight of her. One early morning when the restaurant closed he went home with her to her room. The landlady was always asleep when she got home from work, but all the same she asked him to take his shoes off on the stairs. He still had his orchestra dinner jacket on, a sparkly one, and patent shoes. When he took off the shoes she saw he had a hole in one sock. His big toe stuck out. She smiled at the thought and pushed at the handle of her coffee cup so the cup turned half round.

When she saw his pale big toe poking out of the sock and his expression when he realised she had seen it she knew she loved him. She smiled again and looked into the empty cup. If he hadn’t had that hole in his sock she probably wouldn’t have let him. Everything else about him had been perfect. He had been so well groomed it made her frightened, but that morning she was no longer frightened. She had always hated being so tall and broad-shouldered, she had felt like a lighthouse, but he was just as tall and he made her feel they matched each other. He had had such a nice voice, and he had said some nice things to her. No one had spoken to her like that before.

She stopped and looked up. He should have been your father, she said. They had been together for a couple of months, she and the handsome bass player. She had been in seventh heaven until summer arrived and he met someone else. She looked out over the parapet towards the brick mass of the heating station that still kept a faint reddish glow in the midst of all the blue. Then she had come across the gentlemen’s hairdresser. Robert gave her a long look. She felt it and met his eyes. But he was not to sit there feeling sorry for her, it was long ago. She had been so young. Things didn’t always come up to expectations, he knew that himself, it was nothing to snivel over. She rose and piled up the cups to carry them out. Hadn’t he better call those people?

He rang and again heard the well-modulated woman’s voice. Still no contact with the mobile. He had already come to a decision. Carefully he picked Lauritz up and put his pine cones in his pocket. The boy raised his head, half asleep, and then laid it back against Robert’s shoulder. His mother stroked him kindly on the back when they said goodbye in the doorway. She didn’t usually do that, she had never been very demonstrative. On the way downstairs the light went out. He went slowly down the stairs towards the little glowing orange point where the switch was, afraid of stumbling with the sleeping child in his arms.

He laid him on the back seat, covered him with his jacket and drove through the town and southwards along the motorway. As the blue road signs approached and rushed past, he thought of the unknown bass player with the nice voice, who should have been his father. Who would he have been then? Had his mother occasionally put the same question to herself when she sat on her balcony or lay on the sofa and looked up from her book for a moment? Had he been a reminder that just grew and grew all through his childhood, that nothing turned out according to plan? It wasn’t anything to snivel over, she had said, and instead of snivelling she had stuck to her job and sacrificed herself for her son. She had sought flight in novels and, compared with their more dramatic and tragic fates, she had doubtless thought her own was too trivial and average ever to be called a fate. It had just turned out as it had. Nothing to write home about.

There were a lot of lorries on the motorway, German, Italian, Spanish lorries, and Dutch ones. He stayed in the inside lane although that made him slower. He felt like listening to music but did not switch on for fear of waking Lauritz. It was really a kind of kidnapping, but what could he do? It was a real mess. He had stumbled straight into the chaos and confusion of perfect strangers as if they were his concern. He recalled an expression he had often heard his mother use when she commented on something she had witnessed or heard about. As if it was anything special. That was her judgement when someone complained of their troubles or protested at life’s injustice. Only war, natural catastrophes and mortal illness could produce a sympathetic remark. Was it her own privations that had made her so scornful towards others’ woes? He did not believe that, for she had never seemed bitter, only extremely remote. It was more likely that her contempt for her own pain had made her unfeeling about others’, until she stopped distinguishing.

When she sighed it was not because she was sorry for herself. Her nose and throat had just developed into a kind of ventilator from which disappointment, regret and sorrow were ejected now and then, quietly and without fuss. That was all she allowed herself, a minor character, as in her own opinion she was, in the great novel of the world, whose chief action in any case took place somewhere else, far out of range. Her frugality was not only dictated by her scant means, she practised it on principle and maybe it was a way of compensating for her unusual height, which had embarrassed her so when she was young. She apparently thought she took up more space than was right, and so ought to restrict her existence in every way possible. She had never thought of herself and as a whole had spent everything she earned on her son. Once she had bought a bicycle for his birthday, a shining, brand-new blue cycle with white tyres. He had wished for one for a whole year without ever really believing he would get it, but when he woke in the morning and saw it standing beside his bed, his rejoicing was dulled by the thought of what it had cost.

While Robert drove down the motorway with the sleeping Lauritz on the back seat he asked himself whether his mother with her pinching and scraping had actually wanted to punish herself because she had a child with the wrong man, when the right one had thrown her over. It was nothing special, nor did she feel that she herself was, and looking back he suspected that in her heart, with all her frugality she had intended to economise herself into extinction. Her total lack of egoism had not prevented her becoming slightly misanthropic. In her view no human being was anything very special. But she had also found a strange, anonymous freedom when she sat on her balcony and now and then raised her eyes from one of her novels to watch the trains go by.